Michael Prescott - Mortal Faults

“And the bomb?”

“I’m not sure what that was about. I heard the noise. Do you know what Abby did?”

“She went into the bathroom. She said something about hairspray.”

“Okay. She improvised a grenade out of a can of hairspray. The stuff is flammable. That’s all you have to know. Just say you did it. If they press you for details, tell them you’re too shaken up to talk about it.”

“That wouldn’t be a lie. I am pretty shaken up.”

“We can have you taken to the hospital.”

Hospital. Andrea shook her head firmly. “No. No hospital.”

“Just for observation. As a precaution.”

“No. I’m not going there. You can’t make me go there.”

“Okay, okay. No one’s going to make you do anything, Ms. Lowry.”

More people arrived after that. The paramedics wanted to check her over, but she refused to let them touch her. She wouldn’t let any medical people come near her ever again.

They left, but the house was still crowded. There were crime lab people marking the spots where bullets had struck the walls and taking photographs and videotapes. Police and federal agents were arguing about jurisdiction, ignoring her until somehow the FBI established that they were in control of the case. Then she was taken aside by a pair of men in suits who interviewed her gently but thoroughly about what transpired. She said what Agent McCallum had told her to say. She wasn’t even thinking about it. It was as if a hypnotic suggestion had been planted in her mind and she was powerless to resist.

At some point the FBI people suggested that she leave her house for the night and stay with a friend. She told them there was no one she could stay with. They suggested a hotel. She said no. She would not leave the house, not even after what had happened. The house was her refuge, the only place she felt safe. And even now, after everything that had happened, she still felt safe here-safer than anywhere else. It was irrational, but she couldn’t fight it.

One of the FBI men told her there was a chance the criminals would come back.

She knew that. Still, she insisted, “I can’t leave. I just can’t.”

She gathered that the attack was being treated as a home invasion, a failed robbery. She knew this was wrong, but said nothing.

By nine o’clock most of the law enforcement personnel had left. Agent McCallum was among the last to depart. She thanked Andrea for her cooperation, keeping her language carefully ambiguous.

“You never answered my question,” Andrea said.

“Which question?”

“How did you get here so quickly?”

“I was working an unrelated case very close by. I can’t give you the details. It’s an ongoing investigation. I heard the gunshots and came running.”

Andrea lowered her voice so only Tess could hear. “So it’s just a coincidence, you knowing Abby?”

“Just a coincidence. L.A. is a smaller town than it seems.”

This had to be a lie. Andrea didn’t believe in coincidence. It was possible that McCallum was working with Abby, backing her up or something. Unlikely, but the alternative was that the FBI had been interested in Andrea herself-watching her home, even. But this was a prospect too disturbing to consider.

Alone, she wandered through the house, surveying the damage. The corridor leading to her bedroom was pocked with bullet holes, the carpet charred by Abby’s improvised bomb. One bedroom window had been shattered. The bedroom walls were speckled with more bullet holes. By now the bullets themselves were gone. The crime lab experts had dug them out of the walls and taken them away. The recovery of the bullets had made the holes bigger and deeper. They gaped like a lunar craters.

The thought of bullets reminded her of her own gun, confiscated by the authorities for ballistics tests. She wished they hadn’t taken it. She felt defenseless without it.

But there was another gun.

She had almost forgotten it. She had purchased the gun soon after buying this house, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. The pistol had seemed like a good choice because it held more than twice as many rounds as a revolver. But when she took it into the desert to practice shooting, the gun jammed. Pistols could do that, she learned. The feeding mechanism that inserted the cartridge into the chamber could malfunction. She hadn’t trusted the gun after that. She’d bought the revolver to replace it. The revolver held only six rounds, but it was dependable. When she practiced with it in the wilderness, it never failed her.

The pistol had gone into a shoe box, which was hidden in a tiny overhead crawlspace that served as an attic. She pulled down the collapsible ladder and climbed into the crawlspace, hunting among miscellaneous junk-a lamp that no longer worked but that she hadn’t wanted to throw out, some empty vases she’d been meaning to use for flowers, old clothes she should’ve donated to Goodwill. After twenty minutes of searching, she found the box with the pistol in it. The gun had not been oiled in months, and she could not be sure it would work, but she had a full magazine stashed alongside it in the box, and when she attached the magazine, it clicked smoothly into place. The pistol felt small and light, almost like a toy when compared with the bulkier revolver, but holding it gave her some comfort.

She stashed it in the kitchen drawer where the revolver had been. She hoped she wouldn’t need it.

But somehow she was sure she would.

The briefing was held in the squad room at eight thirty p.m. after three hours at Andrea Lowry’s house, during which time Tess had told her story and Andrea had told hers, and nobody, it seemed, had poked any holes in either narrative. Outside the house, the media gathered like sharks scenting blood-first one mobile news unit cruising up to the yellow ribbon at the crime-scene perimeter, then a second and third, until all of L.A.’s major TV stations were represented, along with two news radio stations, the L.A. Times, and the L.A. Daily News. Eventually a police officer placated the journalists with a hurried outdoor news conference in which he described the attack as a random home invasion foiled by an armed householder. The presence of the FBI at the scene went unmentioned, and no one among the reporters noticed it.

All of that, along with the work of a team of criminalists who tagged and tagged every spent shell and recoverable bullet, was now over, and Hauser’s squad, minus six members who remained in Andrea’s neighborhood, had reassembled in the bullpen on the seventeenth floor of the federal building, where Hauser was sketching out a geometrical diagram on a whiteboard.

“We’re kicking this operation into higher gear,” he said briskly. “From here on, it’s a three-pronged strategy. I’ve broken it out in boxes.” He tapped the board. “First, surveillance. Whitley and Conklin are in the house next door. Davis and Palumbo are parked down the street in an undercover van. Rice and Bowles have separate posts in other vehicles. I doubt the subject is going anywhere tonight, but as of tomorrow we’ll have a minimum of three additional vehicles in the vicinity, ready to conduct clandestine mobile surveillance whenever she goes out. From now on, she never leaves our sight. I want to know where she is at all times, and who she’s talking to, if anyone. Only agents who were not at the crime scene are eligible for surveillance duty. If you were there, she probably got a look at you, which means she may be able to ID you. We do not want her aware of our interest.”

Surveillance wasn’t limited to visual contact. During the search of Andrea’s house, a technical agent had bugged her phone and planted a miniature camera in the living room. The transmitters’ signals would reach the house next door, where the closest surveillance agents were stationed. It was all legal, the warrant obtained telephonically earlier that day.