The Shadow Hunter

a UCLA girl. Some of them might go for a cop.”
    “I’m past thirty. Too old for them. Anyway, I don’t want a girl.”
    “Your secret’s safe with me. Don’t ask, don’t tell, that’s my policy.”
    “What I meant was, it’s a woman I want. A grown woman.”
    “There are three million of them in the greater LA area.”
    “Women, yeah. Grown women? I’m not so sure. That’s the thing about LA.” Wyatt sipped his beer. “People don’t have to be adults here. They can be kids forever. Like, I was talking to this grocery checker the other day, and she tells me how her houseplants can read her mind. When she’s unhappy, they don’t bloom. So to keep them healthy, she only thinks happy thoughts. She beams happy thoughts to her azaleas.”
    “Future rocket scientist,” Abby commented.
    “Future nothing. She’s thirty-five years old. This is it for her. This is as grown up as she’s gonna get.”
    “She may have other redeeming qualities.”
    “I don’t want somebody with redeeming qualities. I don’t want redeeming qualities to be an issue in the first place.”
    “You have high standards.”
    “Well, yeah.”
    “Maybe nobody can meet them.”
    He looked at her. “Oh, I think somebody can.”
    This conversational path had turned out to be not so safe after all. “I’d better get going,” Abby said.
    “Nice to run into you.”
    She slid off the bar stool and picked up her purse. “I may need to get in touch about something.”
    “Business related? Don’t answer that. It’s always business related. Well, you know where to find me—but I was hoping you’d quit that line of work.”
    She slung the purse over her shoulder. “You mean research?”
    “No, not research.”
    “What, then?”
    “That’s something I’ve been trying to figure out. It keeps me up nights.”
    “Don’t lose sleep over me. I’m not worth it.”
    “I doubt that.”
    “Night, Vic.”
    “See you, Abby.”
    She left the bar and emerged into the whirl of Westwood Village. Two come-ons in a half hour, a new record. Of course, the kid with fake ID had been only—well, only a kid. As for Wyatt, she didn’t know quite what to make of him. He was lonely, she guessed. Maybe she was lonely too. Lonely despite Travis. Or because of Travis. Because of the peculiar nature of their relationship, its built-in distance and wariness.
    She put the issue out of her mind. It didn’t matter. Whatever she was feeling, she could handle it. She could handle anything. She was tough.
    Jet lag had never been a problem for her. She dropped off to sleep at midnight and woke refreshed at seven. For breakfast she fried vegetable-protein sausages and an egg-white omelet. She avoided coffee; in her profession it didn’t pay to be jumpy. Instead she brewed herbal tea.
    Before showering, Abby ran through a workout routine drawn from the
YMCA Fitness Manual
—no-nonsense exercises like sit-ups, bent-knee push-ups, hamstring stretches, and chest rotations. The full program, from warm-up to cool-down, took thirty minutes. On some days she substituted t’ai chi or shadow-boxing. There were many ways to stay fit.
    Only after she was dressed in fresh clothes, with her hair toweled dry and brushed straight, did she allow herself to look at the case file. Paper-clipped to the back page was an eight-by-ten color glossy. The shot had been taken with a telephoto lens, squashing its subject against an unfocused background smear. It had probably been snapped from a moving car—a drive-by, in the strange parlance of the security business.
    The subject was Hickle, of course. He had been caught on film as he emerged from a doorway, perhaps the entrance to his apartment building or the donut shop where he worked. She couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. What mattered was the man himself. He had a thin, suspicious face and small eyes. He was scrawny and looked tall. His black hair was a sloppy, disarranged pile.
    She tried to draw a few preliminary conclusions from the photo. Hickle seemed indifferent to personal grooming, often a sign of depression or social alienation. His skin was pale, almost pasty, suggesting he spent most of his time indoors. He wore a shapeless brown sweatshirt and faded jeans, clothes that would not attract attention; he didn’t want to stand out. His body language—head lowered, eyes narrowed, lips pursed—conveyed a cagey wariness that reminded her of a mongrel dog that had learned to fend for itself on the