One by One (27 page)

Anna riffled through the contents of her bag. She found the phone and brought it to her ear.

The man standing just a few feet behind Anna and Patricia smiled.

Sixty-Three

‘Hey, hun!’ Anna said into her cellphone. ‘This is a surprise.’

Garcia kept his voice as calm as he could manage. ‘Anna, listen. Where in town are you right now?’

‘What?’

‘I know you’re out shopping with your friend, but where exactly are you now?’

Anna looked at Patricia and pulled a face. ‘How do you know I’m out shopping with a friend?’

‘Anna, please . . . I don’t have time to explain everything. What I need is for you to tell me exactly where you are, OK?’

‘Um . . . I’m in Tujunga Village . . . Carlos, what’s going on?’

Located near bustling Ventura Boulevard, in Studio City, but seemingly a world away from everything, Tujunga Village was nestled between the Colfax Meadows neighborhood and Woodbridge Park. The heart of the Village was the block-long stretch of Tujunga Avenue, between Moorpark and Woodbridge, where boutiques, restaurants, cafés and miscellaneous stores catered for even the most discerning of visitors.

‘Baby, I told you, I don’t have a lot of time to explain,’ Garcia said. ‘But I need you to trust me right now, OK?’

Anna nervously tucked a loose strand of her short black hair behind her left ear. ‘Carlos, you’re scaring me.’

‘I’m sorry. There’s no need for you to be scared. I just need you to trust me right now. Can you do that?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘OK. Who’s with you?’

‘Um . . . Pat, my friend from yoga. You remember her, right?’

‘Yeah. She came to your birthday drinks, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘OK. Listen, I need you to find a busy place – like a café, or a pizzeria, or a burger joint, whatever, and go sit in there with Pat and wait for me. I’m on my way to you now. Do not engage in a conversation with anyone.
No one at all.
And do not leave the place, under any circumstances, until I get to you. Do you understand that, baby?’

‘Yeah . . . but . . .’

‘Call me as soon as you find a place, OK?’

Anna knew Garcia too well to be fooled by his calm tone. He’d never questioned her about her whereabouts, or who she was out with, or anything else for that matter. They had always trusted each other, pure and simple. That was the foundation their relationship was built on. And he had never before told her what to do, unless she had asked for his advice first. Something was definitely off.

‘Carlos, what’s this about?’ Anna’s voice weakened a notch. ‘Did something happen? Are my parents OK?’

Patricia was standing next to Anna with a concerned look on her face.

‘No, baby,’ Garcia replied. ‘Nothing has happened to anyone, I promise you. Look, I’ll be there in twenty-five minutes, half an hour tops. I’ll explain everything then. Just trust me. Find a place and sit tight.’

Anna took a deep breath. ‘OK. Look, I already know where we’re going to go. We’ll be inside Aroma Café. It’s halfway up Tujunga Village. We’re just coming up to it now.’

‘Great, baby. Get in there, grab a coffee and I’ll be with you in a few minutes.’

Garcia disconnected.

Sixty-Four

Garcia saw Anna even before Hunter finished parking right in front of the Aroma Café. She and Patricia were sitting at a small table toward the front of the glass-fronted store.

Anna had sat there deliberately, her nervous eyes wandering up and down Tujunga Avenue, as if following a tense, invisible tennis match. As she saw Garcia and Hunter step out of the car, she got up and dashed outside. Patricia followed her.

Garcia met her by the door, and instinctively threw his arms around her as if he hadn’t seen her for years, kissing her hair as she buried her face into his chest.

‘You OK?’ he asked, relief taking over him.

Anna looked up at her husband, and the tension of the moment filled her eyes with tears. ‘I’m OK. What’s going on, Carlos?’

‘I’ll explain in a moment. Did you drive here?’

Anna shook her head.

‘We took the bus,’ Patricia said. She was standing next to Hunter, wide-eyed and confused, watching the scene between Anna and Garcia.

Hunter’s eyes were scanning the street, searching for anyone who looked to have taken any sort of interest in their group. No one seemed to care. People on both sides of Tujunga Avenue were just getting on with their lives. Some window-shopping, some entering or exiting one of the many cafés or restaurants on the busy road, and others just enjoying a leisurely walk at the end of a nice Californian autumn day. No one inside the café seemed interested in them either.

Hunter had also already surveyed the street for CCTV cameras. There weren’t any. Unlike many cities in Europe, some with as many as one camera for every fourteen people, Los Angeles wasn’t a surveillance-crazy city. There wasn’t a single government or law-enforcement CCTV camera in the entire Tujunga Village stretch.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Anna said. ‘Robert, this is my friend Patricia.’

Hunter shook her hand. ‘Pleasure to meet you.’

Patricia was a little over five foot five, though black high-heeled boots added a couple of inches to her height.

‘The pleasure is mine,’ she replied, sending him a sincere smile.

Hunter handed the car keys back to Garcia. ‘Carlos, you take the car and take Anna and Patricia home,’ he said. ‘I can make my way back to the PAB from here. Though I might stay and look around for a little while.’

‘Look around for what?’ Anna asked. Her eyes settled on Hunter, as she knew her husband wouldn’t offer an explanation.

Hunter’s gaze rested on his partner for only a split second before moving to his wife. ‘Nothing in particular, Anna.’

Anna’s stare remained hard. ‘That’s bullshit.’

‘Look,’ Hunter said. ‘Trust us on this. Carlos will explain everything to you later.’

‘I promise I will,’ Garcia said, squeezing her hand. ‘But right now, we need to go.’

Sixty-Five

As soon as Garcia dropped Patricia off in front of her apartment block in Monterey Park, Anna turned and faced him.

‘OK, I’m not waiting until we get home so we can talk about this, Carlos. What the hell is going on?’ Anna still sounded rattled. ‘I could see there was nothing happening in Tujunga Village – no squad cars, no one being arrested, no emergency, nothing out of the ordinary to speak of.’

Garcia shifted a gear and joined North Mednick Avenue, going south.

‘This has got something to do with whatever you’re investigating at the moment, hasn’t it?’ Anna asked rhetorically. ‘I know because Robert was surveying the street like a man on a mission. Who are you guys looking for? How did you know that I was out shopping with a friend? Why are you scaring me like this?’ Tears welled up in her eyes.

Garcia took a deep breath.

‘Talk to me, Carlos, please.’

‘I have to ask you for something,’ Garcia finally said, his voice steady.

Anna leaned back against the passenger’s door, wiped the tears from her eyes and stared at her husband.

‘I need you to stay at your parents’ for a few hours. I’ll come and pick you up later.’

Anna took two whole seconds to digest the request before her nerves took over again. ‘What? You said that nothing had happened to my parents. Are they OK?’

‘Yes, yes, they’re fine, baby. Nothing happened to them. I just need you to stay there for a few hours. I need to go back to the PAB and sort a few things out. I’ll come and get you in a short while.’

Anna waited.

Garcia said nothing else.

‘And that’s all you’re going to say?’ she challenged.

One of the reasons why Garcia and Anna’s relationship worked so well was because they both knew they could always talk to each other, no matter what. And they always did. There was never any recrimination, jealousy or judgment. They were both great listeners, and they supported and understood each other better than they understood themselves.

Anna could see Garcia was struggling with it.

‘Carlos,’ she said, placing a hand on his knee. ‘You know I trust you. I always have, and I always will. If you want me to go stay with my parents for a few hours, I can do that, it’s not a problem, but I have the right to know the reason why. Why don’t you want me to go home? What is going on?’

Garcia knew Anna was right. He also knew that there was no way he could give her the real reason without frightening her, but he had no other alternative. If he lied, she would see right through him. She always did.

He took another deep breath and told her what had happened earlier in the day.

Anna listened without interrupting. When he was done, tears had returned to her eyes, and Garcia felt his heart tighten inside his chest.

‘He was right behind us?’ Anna asked. ‘Filming us?’

Garcia nodded.

‘And he was broadcasting it live over the Internet?’

‘Over the Internet, yes,’ Garcia said. ‘But not open to everyone, just to Robert and me. No one else could see it.’

Anna didn’t want or need to know the technical details.

‘Please, Anna, just stay with your parents for a few hours. I need to get a few things in motion, and I want to check our apartment.’

Anna coughed. ‘You think he’s been in our
home
?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Garcia said with conviction. ‘But I have to be absolutely sure, because the paranoid cop in me won’t rest until I am. You know that.’

At that moment Anna couldn’t be sure if the emotion in Garcia’s voice was anger or fear.

‘So this is the same person who abducted and killed that
LA Times
reporter who was on the paper this morning,’ she finally said. ‘He broadcast it over the Internet, didn’t he? Just like he did with Pat and me.’

Garcia didn’t need to reply. Anna knew she was right.

He kept his eyes on the road and tightened his grip on the steering wheel, bottling all he could inside. What he really wanted to ask Anna was for her to leave Los Angeles until they had this psycho behind bars. But she would never agree to it, even if her life
were
in danger. Anna was a determined, very stubborn and totally committed woman. She worked with deprived elderly people, people who needed and depended on her on a daily basis. Even if she could, she wouldn’t just get up and leave them overnight. And Garcia had no way of knowing how long this hunt would take.

Garcia had agreed with Hunter that
today
, this killer had no real intention of harming Anna. But he took it as a warning, an eye-opener. The killer could very well change his mind tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that . . . and Garcia knew there was very little he could do about it. What the killer had broadcast this afternoon had filled him with real fear, and highlighted a frightening truth. The truth that despite who he was, despite how much he wanted to, he couldn’t truly protect Anna twenty-four hours a day. The killer knew that. And today he made sure Garcia and Hunter knew it too.

Sixty-Six

With the old-fashioned, closet-sized elevator stuck somewhere at the top of the building, Ethan Walsh took the steps up to his fourth-floor apartment in a hurry, and two at a time. The problem was that physical exercise wasn’t even part of his vocabulary, never mind his daily routine. By the time he hit the second floor, he was out of breath, red-faced and sweating like a sumo wrestler in a sauna about to have a heart attack. Though Ethan had gained a little extra weight in the past few months, he wasn’t exactly fat, but he sure was unfit.

Usually he would’ve taken his time conquering the eight flights of stairs that led up to his flat, cursing as he reached the top of each one, but tonight he was already ten minutes late for his half-hour, face-to-face call with his four-year-old daughter, Alicia.

When Alicia was born, Ethan’s life seemed to be on a plain-sailing course to success. Ethan was an independent videogames programmer, and a very good one at that. He had developed several online games by himself, and for three consecutive years he’d won the prestigious Mochis Flash Games Award for Best Strategy and Puzzle Game of the Year. But with the advent of direct online stores for major platforms like Microsoft’s X-Box 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3, a whole new world had been presented to independent videogames developers. And there was a hell of a lot of money to be made.

Ethan had discussed the idea of creating a game for the X-Box 360 with Brad Nelson, a brilliant Canadian games programmer he had met several years back. Brad said that he had also been playing around with the same idea, but doing it alone was a mountainous task. After a few more talks, they decided to do it together, and that was how Ethan and Brad created AssKicker Games just six months before Ethan’s baby girl was born.

Brad was very well connected, and on the strength of Ethan’s games awards he managed to secure a couple of very healthy investments, which enabled both of them to quit their day jobs and concentrate solely on developing their first major console game.

Within seven months they had a short playable demo that went viral on the X-Box 360 store. An incredible buzz started about the game and their company, but Ethan was a perfectionist, and he kept on stripping and redoing enormous chunks of the game, which severely hindered its progress. Arguments started breaking out between Ethan and Brad on a daily basis. The completion date for the game just kept on being put back further and further, and two years later it was still under development. No one knew for sure when it would be finished. The buzz about the game and their company had died down. The investments dried up. Ethan ended up remortgaging his house and putting everything he had into the company.

The pressure and frustration Ethan was under at work started seeping through into his relationship with his wife, Stephanie, and they started rowing practically every night. Their daughter was almost three then. Ethan was obsessed, depressed and becoming a nervous wreck. That was when Brad Nelson decided to pull the plug on the company. He’d had enough. The arguments had gotten out of hand. He was out of patience and out of money, but not as in debt as Ethan.