Page 24 of Lone Wolf

He’d compiled a basic dossier on Benjamin Hill—Oakland native, applied physics and engineering major at Howard, Ph.D. in bioinformatics from UCLA. Multiple high-level jobs cementing his place as a leading expert in artificial intelligence, culminating in a post as the principal deep-learning scientist at Solventry. His wife, deceased five years. Seventeen-year-old daughter, Jayla Alexis Hill, a junior at the Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts, aka Grand Arts.

All this for a dog.

Approaching a man who by all accounts seemed like a decent human being hardly seemed treacherous. But the travails of the past days had brought Evan full circle back to the Ten Commandments and the operational precision that had kept him alive for three decades and counting.

He walked past the row of town houses once more, head lowered, hands shoved in his pockets. Then he cut through the alley behind them, with its neatly ordered trash bins and sliding garage gates leading to the less swanky neighboring apartment buildings. The windows of Dr. Hill’s town house were tinted, giving nothing back but a reflection of the gray clouds stacked overhead.

The complex constituted a patch of gentrification in L.A. proper just below where the 101 doglegged south. Freeways twined every which way around the neighborhood, overpasses and exits, and there were auto salvages, rail yards, and restaurants to the west butting up against the dry concrete channel of the Los Angeles River. A tent city had sprung up several blocks to the north, and vagrants begged on street corners and camped in doorways of buildings worth millions of dollars. The wealth gap cranking wider, ready to snap.

Circling back, Evan scanned the surrounding balconies and cast an eye along the metered spaces for any parked cars that had their exhaust running. All clear.

Up five concrete steps to the narrow porch. Head cocked at the door, listening for sounds of barking or psychotic growling from within. Nothing.

Evan raised his fist to knock.

Something inside crashed over. Loud and perhaps accidental, like a dropped tray of dishes or a china hutch overturning.

He lowered his fist. Listened some more.

Silence.

He tried the doorknob. Unlocked.

Easing the door open, he stepped into a vestibule with a side table and a Tunisian tapestry of woven wool.

The first thing to hit his senses was the smell. Metallic and minerally, the scent of danger and the hunt, of disgust and arousal. Immediately it skewered him with pinprick memories—a death gurgle in a lampshade shop in Gaza, a crimson-slick stone ledge in a São Paulo bathhouse, an Estonian bleeding out on the floor of an abandoned textile factory.

A chain reaction of muscle memory commenced—from the blood scent to a surge of alertness to the reach for the holster. Evan’s ARES was in hand, his shirt still broken open from the draw for an instant before the magnetic buttons resealed the front with a nearly inaudible clack. The air of the vestibule pressed a slight tackiness against his cheeks. A few cautious strides brought him to the three-story foyer, the scent growing hotter, the town house gaping high and wide. The tall central opening gave the interior a dollhouse effect, catwalks with clear panels, wide doorways, and glass-walled rooms putting much of the space on display. A modern imperial staircase branched up the middle of the place, two symmetrical rises on either side interrupted by landings. The design centerpiece of the town house, the stairs appeared to float, glass tread with no risers curving up through the space like ribs.

White, airy, glass-intensive—it reminded him of his own penthouse. An orderly retreat from the chaos of the world, a home base from which a doctor of bioinformatics might make wild intellectual forays.

Which made the violation of the place all the more jarring.

Pictures had been torn from the walls, drawers dumped, the cushions of the leather sectional slashed.

There was Loco. The ridiculous animal had wedged himself into the corner of the sofa. His ears, adorned with tufts of batting, flared wide like antlers. His ribs quivered beneath steel-gray wiry hair and his bulging eyes seemed ready to pop. Black lips wrinkled back from those snaggly teeth, his tremors reaching epileptic proportions.

A new-looking alarm pad to Evan’s side had been jimmied off the wall, its wires snipped. From the third floor, the sharp edge of daylight knifed through a sliding glass door, its black curtains raked aside on fat wooden hoops resembling napkin rings. The slider let out onto a balcony with wide-set rails that Evan had observed from the alley and—given the setback of the upper floors—he could partially see from the foyer.

He took all this in as if with the peripheral vision of his mind, his primary focus given to the obvious: Dr. Benjamin Hill lying prone on the Berber carpet underpinning the sectional. Zip ties bound his wrists at the small of his back, his ankles secured in like fashion. His hands, purpled from lack of circulation, stubbed upward like a grotesque tail. The suit he wore was rumpled at the knees, his cuffs and sleeves hiked obscenely from the rough treatment he’d received. Neck torqued, chin stabbed into the floor, Adam’s apple on shiny display.

The entrance wound near the top of his head was small and neat, and there was no visible exit wound. Blood trickled from his parted lips to feed a widening spot in the rug. Open eyes stared back at Evan. The left bottom lid fluttered, but Evan knew it was just a trick of the nervous system.

A faint movement on the third floor drew his eye, spiking his adrenaline. As his gaze jerked upward, a compact human form swathed in black peeled away from the swept-back column of black curtains, differentiated abruptly from the matching backdrop.

Benjamin Hill’s killer, still in the house.

14

Desecrated

Aiming up the three stories of the foyer, Evan pinned the black form in the high-profile Straight Eight sights of his 1911. The black fleece balaclava hood covered all but a crescent of face—feminine bone structure and piercing eyes that held no panic. The dead steadiness of the return gaze told him this wasn’t an average robbery-in-progress. She was a seasoned operator.

She was backlit against the sliding glass door. As she shifted, something glinted at her right hand; since he’d caught her off guard, she hadn’t had time to lift her weapon. He couldn’t be sure from this distance but he guessed it was a .22 revolver, which would have two advantages. A revolver would leave no incriminating shells to pick up. And a .22 wouldn’t provide enough bullet velocity for the round to exit the skull, leaving it to bounce around, scrambling the brain. He thought of that neat entry hole atop Dr. Hill’s head auguring the damage within.

“Move forward,” he said.

She took a moment, but despite the three floors separating them he had her and she knew he had her. With a single elegant stride, she eased to the waist-high panel wall of the catwalk. She was short, maybe five three.