The Shadow Hunter

Hickle, a guy who had a penchant for becoming obsessed with beautiful women, a guy who might have tried to splash acid in Jill Dahlbeck’s face.
    Wyatt wondered how often Abby had tried her skill at this kind of contest. It was amazing she was still alive. She must bedamn good or damn lucky. Maybe both. But everyone made mistakes, and nobody’s luck held forever.
    Wyatt let out a slow breath. So what was he going to do about her? He didn’t know. Maybe the best option was to walk away, leave her alone. She had told him she didn’t want his help.
I can take care of myself
, she’d said.
    But suppose she got in over her head. Would she admit it? Or would she plow onward, too stubborn and proud to back down?
    He was pretty sure he knew the answer.

23
    Abby woke in a bed that was not her own. She came alert instantly and knew where she was—Travis’s bedroom. And she knew it was late, well past noon, and that Travis had let her sleep when he left for work.
    She looked at the clock on the nightstand. The time was 3:47. She’d slept nearly all day. She ought to have felt guilty about it, but she knew she had needed the downtime. A body could run on adrenaline for only so long.
    Hunger had awakened her. It urged her out of bed now. She went into the kitchen and raided Travis’s fridge, finding a gourmet frozen pasta meal, which she microwaved and then ate out of the container while standing up. According to the package, the meal was only two hundred calories—not enough, but it would hold her.
    When she was through, she returned to the bedroom, where she retrieved the spare house key Travis had left on the bureau. Then she took a long look at the TV that was really a safe. When Travis had punched in seven digits on the remote control, she’d been watching. She knew the code.
    Feeling vaguely disloyal, she picked up the remote and pressed the necessary buttons. The safe’s false front swung open.She looked inside. The CDs were arranged alphabetically. She flipped through them until she found the one she wanted. When she lifted it out, the disk flashed, catching the light. The label read “SINCLAIR, ABIGAIL.”
    She was not surprised. If Travis performed background checks on his clients’ friends and business partners, it made sense for him to take similar precautions with his own associates.
    Of course, she was more than an associate, wasn’t she? She had been Travis’s lover for four years, his protégée, his confidante. Yet her life, or as much of it as could be gleaned from databases, had been stored on this electromagnetic disk and filed away for safekeeping here in the same bedroom where Travis had made love to her, not only today but many times.
    Perhaps she should have been outraged. But she knew how this business worked. No one could be trusted fully. Everyone had to be checked out.
    “Even the people you’re sleeping with?” she wondered aloud, but she knew the answer to that.
    Especially the people you’re sleeping with.
    Those were the rules of the game. She had to accept them.
    She replaced the CD and shut the safe, then left the house, wishing she could be naive enough to be angry. Anger would have felt good right now.
    The house in Culver City was located on an unappealing side street off Sawtelle Boulevard. Decrepit garden apartments were interspersed with bungalows in the old Craftsman style, houses that once had been comfortable starter homes for young families. Back then, the lawns had been neatly tended, the paint touched up every year. Now cars stood on cement blocks in weedy driveways, and graffiti decorated the brick walls that had been raised as ineffectual barriers to crime. Barred windows were everywhere. Although it was late afternoon, no children played in the street, and no one walked here. The onlyvisible life was a stray dog nosing through the litter that lined the curb.
    “Looks like the people at Trendline made one hell of an investment,” Abby muttered as she parked down the street.
    The address had come up on the computer screen when Travis reviewed the data with her. It had been visible long enough for her to commit it to memory. She’d had a feeling she would be paying a visit to the property.
    She got out of her car and approached the bungalow. Unlike its neighbors, it was freshly painted, the lawn only slightly overgrown. A detached one-car garage lay at the end of a short driveway. She passed between the house and the garage into a small, unfenced backyard,