The Shadow Hunter

everywhere from Oxnard to La Jolla.” She looked at him, her face upturned in a streetlight’s glow, her expression hard. “The only way I could convince them to take me seriously is if I explain my involvement in the case. And that’s more than I want them to know.”
    “They’ll know it anyway, once Hickle is in custody and starts to talk.”
    “But maybe they’ll be inclined to go easy on me, overlook some of the various felonies I’ve committed over the past few days—if I’m the one who brings him in.”
    A minivan burred past, headlights sweeping the pavement. Neither of them spoke until was it gone. Then Travis said, “You want to capture him? Personally?”
    “I was thinking more along the lines of us. As in you and me together. We go up into the building, and we find a way to make Hickle come along quietly.”
    “We’re not vigilantes, Abby.”
    “Speak for yourself. Besides, it’s a citizen’s arrest, that’s all. We get the jump on Hickle, disarm him, and drive him to the West LA police station.”
    “Unless he gets the jump on us first.”
    “It’s a risk, admittedly.” She puffed her cheeks and blew out a jet of breath. “Everything I’ve done in the past few days is a risk. So how about it? You with me?”
    Travis made a show of indecision, though of course there was nothing to debate. On the drive over, he’d plotted gambits to get Abby inside the tower, where he could deliver the fatal shot with no risk of being heard by anyone but Hickle. Now she was volunteering to go in, even insisting on it. It was perfect.
    “Oh, hell, I’m with you,” he said finally. “Of course I am.”

50
    Kris was glad she lived at Malibu Reserve. The gated complex had not protected her from Hickle, but tonight it served the almost equally important function of keeping out the crush of reporters stationed beyond the fence.
    As a reporter herself, she understood the desperation that drove her colleagues to camp out on the shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway, or dial her home number sixty times an hour until Courtney disconnected the phone, or buzz overhead in helicopters taking footage of her deck, or slip onto the beach and focus long lenses on her windows. She had done such things herself during the earlier stages of her career when she had delivered reports from the field.
    She risked opening the vertical blind on her bedroom window far enough to see a slice of the moonlit beach and the pale, restless tide. She supposed she couldn’t complain too loudly about her present circumstances. She was, after all, alive. Her heart still pumped, and her face in the mirror had lost some of its haunted, harried strangeness. She had begun to feel almost like herself again. The strain of waiting for something to happen hadfinally been relieved. Now there were only the broken pieces of the aftermath that had to be picked up and put together.
    She wondered where Howard was.
    The police had confirmed what Abby had told her—he’d been hiding their joint assets in overseas accounts. The accounts had been opened in the Netherlands Antilles. It was possible Howard had made his way to the islands already. Of course, he need not go there. He could travel anywhere in the world and still be within reach of his money. Martin Greenfeld, Howard’s lawyer, had speculated that he might have headed south to Mexico, but Kris couldn’t picture her husband in a Third World country. He was too accustomed to the good life.
    She doubted he’d ever planned an escape. He had fled out of sheer panic. He would be caught before long. Her husband had his areas of competence, but running from the law was not likely to be among them. Luckily for her, in conspiring with a stalker to have her killed, he had proven equally inept.
    “To have me killed,” she whispered. It still didn’t seem real. An extramarital affair she could believe all too easily. But to plot her murder…to rendezvous with a man like Hickle, a lunatic, a fanatic…
    Her husband, the overgrown child with his toy trains and radio-controlled model airplanes, was a killer. Or a would-be killer anyway, foiled only by Travis’s foresight.
    “Kris?” That was Courtney, calling from downstairs.
    Kris left the bedroom and leaned over the railing in the hallway to gaze down at the living room. “Yes?”
    “They just talked to me over the intercom. The guys in the cottage.”
    Travis’s men, still on post until Hickle was caught. “And?”
    “They said Mr.