The Shadow Hunter

Barwood’s come back.”
    These words were so strange that Kris couldn’t absorb them. “Come back?” she echoed.
    “He’s here with some police. They’re letting him in for a minute. I don’t know why.” The doorbell chimed. “That’s him.”
    There was silence while Kris tried to sort this out. “Well, let him in,” she said finally.
    Slowly she descended the stairs while Courtney opened the door for Howard and four other men. One was Martin Greenfeld, two others were uniformed patrol officers, and the fourth was a man in a business suit who must be a detective.
    At the foot of the stairs Kris stopped, staring at her husband from across the room. She saw fear in his face and something more, something that might have been a desperate, faltering effort at courage. He was not handcuffed, she noticed. They had granted him that much dignity. “Howard,” she said.
    “Hello, Kris.” Even from a distance she saw the heavy swallowing motion of his throat. “It’s not true.”
    “What isn’t?”
    “All the crap they’re saying on TV. The charges and allegations. I never talked to Hickle. I never gave him any help. I never wanted to see you hurt.”
    “Then why did you call him on that cell phone?”
    “I didn’t. It’s not even my phone. I never bought it.”
    “Then how did it get into our downstairs closet?”
    “I don’t know. It’s a frame. It has to be.”
    Kris had done enough interviews with the guilty to know that nearly all of them said they had been framed. “Then why did you run?” she asked tonelessly.
    “I got scared. I figured these sons of bitches planted the phone to hang me. I figured there was no way to fight them.”
    The man who must be a detective spoke Howard’s name in a low tone of warning. He and the two patrol officers hadn’t liked being called sons of bitches. Howard didn’t seem to notice.
    “I came back,” he said. ‘That’s what you have to understand.”
    “You got caught.”
    “No, I turned myself in. I walked into the West LA station and surrendered. I didn’t have to. I was halfway to Arizona when I turned back.”
    “Arizona? What’s there for you?”
    “Nothing. That’s what I realized. That’s why I had to come back. I called Martin”—he glanced at the attorney as if reassuring himself that Greenfeld was still there—“and he worked out a deal. I would turn myself in, and in exchange I’d be brought here.”
    “Why?” She tried to sound hard, though the effort was exhausting her. “Did you forget your toothbrush?”
    “I wanted to see you…here, in our home. I had to tell you what I just told you—whether you want to hear it or not.”
    Kris was quiet for a moment. “That was the deal? Just to be escorted home?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then what?”
    “County jail, until Martin can work things out, however long that takes.”
    Despite herself, Kris almost smiled. “A night in stir? I’ll bet you’d rather be in Arizona.”
    “No. Right here is where I have to be. All I want is for you to believe me.”
    “You did transfer our assets overseas, didn’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you’ve been having an affair?”
    “Yes.”
    “With whom?”
    To his credit Howard did not avert his gaze. “Amanda.”
    Kris blinked, appalled as much by his bad taste as by anything else. “Amanda at work? Anorexic Amanda?”
    “I’m sorry, Kris.”
    She thought of Amanda Gilbert’s sympathetic cooing when told that Howard might be unfaithful, her promise to sit down for a nice heart-to-heart. She made a mental note to have the bitch fired. “You could have done better,” she said simply.
    “I already did. I was too stupid to know it.”
    Kris knew he was hoping for some encouragement or forgiveness. She would not give it to him. “I think you should go,” she whispered.
    “I didn’t do it,” Howard said.
    Martin advised him not to say anything more.
    The two patrolmen were easing him toward the door when he turned back, grief written on his face. “I never even wanted her. It’s just that she was available and, well, she was—
    “Young,” Kris said. It sounded like an epitaph.
    He left with the others. Before Courtney shut the door, Kris heard the whir of a chopper overhead. Somebody was getting first-rate footage of Howard Barwood as he was led down the garden path to the police car.
    It would lead the late news on some local station. Kris hoped it wasn’t KPTI.

51
    The office tower was hemmed in by cyclone fencing, but the