BEVERLY HILLS — ROOFTOP — 2:51 A.M.
The wind had picked up. It came in low and cold off the Beverly River, carrying with it the smell of water and exhaust and the faint ghost of someone's late-night street food. Hunter felt it against the side of his face but registered it the way he registered most physical sensations on a job: as information, nothing more. Wind speed approximately fourteen kilometers per hour. Direction: northeast. Relevant only in so far as it might affect acoustics.
He had moved from the ledge to a maintenance alcove set into the rooftop's northern face, a recessed doorway that offered shadow and cover and a clean sightline down to the street below.
From the bag he had retrieved from the dead-drop location, a locked storage unit in a parking structure three blocks away, rented under a name that existed nowhere in any official registry, he had assembled his equipment. Each component slid into place with a soft click. He did not rush. Rushing was how mistakes were made.
The target's sedan had not moved. A good sign. People who suspected they were being watched tended to move, restlessly, unpredictably as though their bodies registered the danger their conscious minds refused to acknowledge. This man was still. Still and laughing, still on his phone, a drink visible now in his free hand catching the amber glow of the streetlight.
Comfortable, Hunter thought. He feels safe. He has no reason to feel safe, but he does.
That was the nature of men like the target. Men who had accumulated enough power and enough insulation that the world had stopped feeling dangerous to them. The world had become a place that obeyed them.
Hunter settled into position, and waited
ECHO PARK — RIVERSIDE — 6:38 P.M.
The coordinates had led Lisa to a stretch of the riverside path below the Echo Park Bridge. The place cheerful during daylight with joggers and couples and food vendors, but in the deep grey of the early evening had turned desolate. The river moved black and slow below the embankment. The bridge overhead was a cathedral of steel cables and orange light, its reflection fractured on the water's surface.
She found him leaning against the railing. A slight man in his fifties, grey-haired, wearing a coat that was too thin for the temperature. He was looking at the water with the focused, inward expression of someone who had been doing nothing but thinking for a very long time.
"Mr. Larsson," Lisa said.
The man turned. Up close, he looked worse than she remembered, thinner, the skin around his eyes darkened with sleeplessness, his hands trembling faintly as he gripped the railing. Zen Larsson had been, until eight months ago, a mid-level accountant at Hanley Plc. He had resigned abruptly, without stated reason, and had since appeared in no public record Lisa could find. She had been looking for him for three weeks.
"You came alone," he said. It was not quite surprise in his voice. More like relief.
"You asked me to," she said simply, stepping up beside him at the railing. She did not look at him directly. Experience had taught her that some people spoke more freely when you offered them the dignity of not being studied. "I got your message."
"I wasn't sure you would come. Or if you'd bring half the precinct with you."
"I said I came alone."
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the river. A taxi passed on the bridge above them, its headlights sweeping briefly across the water. "They're going to kill me," he said. His voice was very flat. "If they find out I've been talking to anyone, it's over for me."
"Who is 'they'?"
Zen turned to look at her then, properly, searchingly, as though measuring the depth of her. "You've been looking at the Hanley Plc. killings," he said. It was not a question.
"Three murders in six weeks. All men with ties to Hanley Plc."
"Four," he said quietly.
Lisa went very still. "The fourth hasn't been reported."
"It won't be. The body won't be found." He said it with the terrible certainty. "They're very thorough. The people who hired…" He stopped himself. Swallowed. Started again. "There is someone they use. For situations like this. Someone who doesn't leave evidence, doesn't leave witnesses, doesn't leave—" He exhaled sharply.
"Who hired him?" Lisa asked. Her voice was quiet, steady, betraying nothing of the urgency moving through her like a current.
Zen shook his head. "I don't know the name. I never knew the name. What I know." He reached into his coat pocket with shaking hands and withdrew a small USB drive, holding it out to her without looking at it, the way people hand over things they are afraid to be caught holding. "What I know is on here. Financial records. Shell accounts. Three years of transactions that were buried so deep in the books I almost missed them myself."
Lisa took the drive. It was small and cold in her palm. "Why are you giving me this now?"
"Because I'm next," he said simply. "I know too much and I waited too long to run and now there is nowhere left to go. So I would rather…" He paused. His jaw tightened. "I would rather it meant something. The knowing. I would rather someone else knows too, when I'm gone."
There was a silence between them filled only with the river and the distant sound of the city. Lisa looked at the drive in her hand, then back at Zen. She stared at his thin coat and his hollow eyes and the trembling that had now spread from his hands to his shoulders. Grief, maybe. Anger.
"I can put you in protective custody," she said. "Tonight. Right now. We can…"
"No," he said. Quietly but absolutely. "I don't trust buildings anymore. I don't trust rooms. The last person who went into a room the police called safe…" He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. "Just find out who's giving the orders. That's all I'm asking. Find the name at the top."
He pushed off the railing and turned to walk away. He headed south along the riverside path, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders drawn up against the cold. Lisa watched him go. He did not look back.
BEVERLY HILLS— THE STREET BELOW — 3:04 A.M.
The driver of the black sedan got out first. He was broad, professional-looking, scanning the street with the automatic vigilance of a man paid to be paranoid. Hunter watched him from the shadow of the alcove, completely motionless, his breathing reduced to the slowest, shallowest rhythm his body could sustain.
The driver's gaze moved up, across the building facades, briefly, cursorily, and passed over the alcove without registering it. People rarely looked at the places where shadows were deepest. The human eye sought light instinctively. It was a predictable weakness, and Hunter had long since learned to live inside it.
The target emerged from the sedan. In person he was larger than he'd appeared through the binoculars. He said something to the driver. Hunter could not hear the words at this distance but read the shape of the exchange: dismissive on the target's part, deferential on the driver's. A man sending away his protection for the evening. Confident. Careless.
Or, Hunter thought, with the faintest edge of something that might have been pity, simply tired of being followed everywhere by his own fear.
The driver got back Into the sedan. The target moved toward the building entrance, a private residential tower, polished steel and glass. He was humming something under his breath. Hunter could not hear the tune, but he could see the slight movement of the man's lips, and the almost imperceptible nod of his head.
Hunter tracked the movement. Calculated. Waited.
The target suddenly stopped walking. He had paused on the steps of the building's entrance to check his phone one final time, his face tipped down, illuminated briefly by the screen's pale glow. For just that moment, he was perfectly still.
Hunter exhaled.
And in the silence that followed he took his shot. A second later he was already moving. Disassembling. Repacking. By the time the driver of the sedan would register that something had happened, he would be three buildings away. By the time the police arrived, he would be back in his apartment, showered and changed.
He descended from the rooftop via the fire stairs on the building's east face, moving quickly but without running. Running drew attention; purposeful walking in dark clothing at 3 A.M. merely looked like someone heading home from a late shift. At the base of the stairwell he paused, listened, heard nothing unusual, and stepped out into the alley.
He walked north. His face was neutral. His hands were steady in his pockets. He passed a convenience store, its fluorescent interior throwing a square of brightness onto the pavement, and through the window saw a young woman behind the counter reading a magazine, utterly absorbed, one elbow propped on the counter, chin resting in her hand.
He wondered what she was reading. The thought came and went in less than a second , small and purposeless and human, the kind of thought that leaked through the walls he kept between himself and the world despite all his best efforts to seal every crack.
He kept walking.
Two blocks east, a police siren wailed briefly. Hunter did not break stride, did not tense, did not do anything at all except continue to walk, his footsteps even on the pavement, his breath steady in the cold.
There was still work to be done before morning. There was always still work to be done.
LISA'S APARTMENT — 8:15 P.M.
Lisa sat at her kitchen table with the USB drive in front of her and a glass of water she hadn't touched. The apartment was small and organized. A single plant on the windowsill, slightly overwatered. A row of books on a shelf, criminology, forensic psychology, two dog-eared procedural thrillers that she told no one she owned.
She picked up the drive and turned it between her fingers. Zen's hands had been shaking when he gave it to her. She could still see that, the tremor before he let go, the look of a man handing away the last thing he had to give.
She opened her laptop.
Then she stopped, her hand over the trackpad, and stared at the dark screen of it for a long moment.
Find the name at the top, he had said. As if it were simple. As if names at the top of things like this were findable without cost.
She thought of the whiteboard back at the precinct. Three photographs. Three men who had been, by all conventional measures, not good men. They were men with histories of fraud, coercion, worse. She had not been naïve about what they were. But they had been killed, and the killing of people, even people who had done terrible things, was still a crime. It was her job to solve those crimes.
She plugged in the drive.
The files began to load, spreadsheets dense with numbers, transfer records. She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, her eyes moving quickly across the data the way they moved across crime scenes: not looking for one thing, but open, receptive, waiting for the thing that didn't fit.
Outside her window, Los Angeles continued its evening. The voices from a restaurant below, the wheeze of a passing bus, someone laughing on a balcony. Life in its freest form.
Lisa did not look up from the screen.
She had found something.