MIchael Prescott - The Shadow hunter

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, pausing to look into the garage through a side window.

No car. Most likely, nobody home.

The rear door was screened from the sight lines of neighboring homes by the garage on one side and a large fig tree on the other. She could work on the lock without fear of being seen. Her complete set of locksmith tools was back at the apartment in Hollywood, but in her purse she carried a picklock and tension bar.

She inserted the pick in the keyhole and pressed the bar against the latch. In two minutes she had the door open.

No alarm went off.

"Hello?" she called into the emptiness.

She heard no response, no creak of floorboards, nothing to indicate another presence in the house.

Briskly she explored the place. It was a typical southern California bungalow-one-story floor plan, high ceilings, big windows. The living room had a fake fireplace. The kitchen was so tiny and ill-equipped that it would be more properly called a kitchenette.

There were two bedrooms, one bath.

In the medicine cabinet she found a few personal items: a man's electric shaver, aftershave, and cologne, and a woman's toiletries and lipstick.

There were bath towels on the racks and more towels in a linen closet.

She checked out the bedroom closet, but only a couple of bathrobes hung there. The bed was comfortable, new, and of higher quality than the home's other furnishings.

She poked around in a wastebasket and found a condom wrapper.

"At least he practices safe sex," she muttered.

He. A safely ambiguous pronoun. She wanted to believe that Howard Barwood was the he in question, but so far nothing she'd found in the house could be tied to him.

Whoever made use of the bungalow evidently followed a simple routine. A romp in bed, then a quick shower to cool off. The place wasn't used for any other purpose. There were no foodstuffs in the pantry or the fridge other than some chocolate candies, a half-eaten block of cheese, and an unopened wine bottle. There were no books or magazines anywhere, no evidence of mail delivery to this address. Most likely the utility bills went directly to Trendline Investments and were paid out of the Netherlands Antilles bank account.

Abby searched the drawers of all the bureaus and cabinets, hoping to find some of Howard Barwood's stationery or a cell phone registered to Western Regional Resources. No such luck. Most of the drawers were empty. But in the nightstand beside the bed, she found a gun.

It was a Colt 1911 pistol, loaded with seven.45 caliber rounds. The pistol was an excellent firearm, sturdy and reliable, one of the few models that could be detail-stripped and reassembled without the use of tools, but the gun required care, which its present owner had neglected.

It was in need of lubrication, and the extractor had lost some of its tension and should have been replaced. Abby frowned. She disliked the idea of a gun in the hands of an amateur, and a careless amateur at that. And if the amateur in question was Howard Barwood, and Howard was Hickle's accomplice, she liked the idea even less.

She moved to the second bedroom, which had been made into a study. The room had few accouterments-a thirteen-inch TV on a cheap stand, a worn sofa and armchair, built-in shelves that were depressingly bare, and a telephone.

Not a cell phone like the one that had been used to call Hickle last night. Still, it might tell her something.

She lifted the handset and pressed redial. She counted four rings, and then the ringing stuttered as if the call had been transferred. A moment later a recorded female voice came on the line: "You've reached Amanda Gilbert's voice mail Abby hung up. The name Amanda Gilbert meant nothing to her. She hadn't seen it on any of the folder icons in the Barwood file. Possibly the man of the house had called Amanda at work, or Amanda herself had called to retrieve her messages. Either way, it was a fair assumption that Amanda's duties here had little to do with business.

Before leaving the study, she wiped her fingerprints off the phone, a procedure she had followed with every other item she had touched. She checked the other rooms and returned, at last, to the master bedroom.

It had occurred to her that she ought to take a closer look at the bathrobes in the closet.

Persistence paid off. One robe, as she saw when she examined it in good light, was monogrammed HB. Of course there were plenty of HBS in the world-Halle Berry and Humphrey Bogart came to mind. But she couldn't see Halle Berry hanging out in this neighborhood, and Bogart was dead.

"Gotcha, Howard," she whispered.

"You've been a naughty, naughty boy."

She replaced the robe, then spent a little more time in the bedroom.

When she was done, she left the bungalow via the rear door. She drove around the block, parked across the street, rolled down the window, and slunk low in her seat, getting comfortable. She intended to wait awhile and see if Howard and Amanda showed up. Travis had said Howard went out nearly every evening to drive his new car. There was a good chance this address was his nightly destination.

There was no longer any serious doubt in her mind that Howard was the owner of the house, but the issue was too important to rest solely on a monogram. If Howard was indeed the HB in question, she would know three things with certainty: the house was still his, he was cheating on Kris, and he was the owner of the mysterious Trendline. And if Trendline could be tied to Western Regional Resources-well, she would have all her ducks neatly in a row.

She almost hoped it didn't work out that way. Kris had been hurt badly enough already. It would be better for her if neither Trendline nor Amanda Gilbert had any connection with her husband. But Abby wasn't betting on it. The world was not kind.

The production meeting for the six o'clock news broke up shortly after 5 p.m. Kris left in a rush, stuffing her yellow legal pad into her carrying case, and boarded the elevator with Amanda Gilbert. The two of them rode to ground level together.

"Another day, another nightmare," Amanda observed.

Kris smiled.

"At least no more pint-size pachyderms came into the world at the last minute."

"Still a madhouse. Looks like we won't have time for that heart-to-heart we talked about."

Kris was surprised Amanda even remembered their conversation.

Surprised-and touched. She had never imagined Amanda as the type to worry about feelings and personal crises.

"Maybe after the show," Kris offered, just to have something to say.

Amanda shook her head.

"No can do. I've got a… an engagement."

"A date? Is that what you started to say?"

Amanda looked away, embarrassed. This was Kris's second surprise. She had never imagined that Amanda could be capable of embarrassment on any topic.

"You do have a date, don't you? You, the workaholic?"

Kris gave her a playful punch on the arm.

"Who is he?"

"I'd rather not talk about it."

"You'll talk. This is big stuff. I want to hear all the details."

The elevator doors opened. Amanda got out first, in a hurry to leave.

"Can't oblige you now. I've got a show to get on the air."

"Tomorrow, then." Kris stopped her at the door to the newsroom.

"You tell me the secrets of your love life, and I'll tell you mine, okay?" She shrugged.