dinner with Kate, and then not very well. He crawled into the backseat and was asleep in minutes.
THIRTY-TWO
VAIL SLEPT LESS THAN TWO HOURS AND THEN FITFULLY, AWAKENING at the sound of any vehicle passing by in the covered garage. He got out of the car and walked down to the street, where he watched the traffic for fifteen minutes from a shadowed doorway. When he was satisfied that there was no longer a search being conducted in the neighborhood, he went to his car and drove out.
When he finally found himself a safe distance from the hotel, he pulled over. After turning on the laptop again, he waited while his e-mails downloaded.
There were only three of them. He found the Bureau of Prison’s report and opened it. It was almost twenty pages long and contained a lot of boilerplate because of the extensive records that are necessary in a federal institution due to lawsuits. He scanned it quickly until his eyes landed on the name Benjamin Charles Lavolet, a known associate of Victor James Radek. He had been serving a fifteen-year sentence for narcotics distribution and was paroled just a month before the first Pentad murder in Los Angeles. His last known address was 1414 Sistine Lane, apartment 2W, in Los Angeles. Vail located it on a map Web site and saw that it was about half a mile from the Spring Street house. The factory on Keller Street was about a mile away. The building being refurbished on Seventh was less than a ten-minute drive.
Vail pulled back into traffic. The sun was starting to set. The air smelled like rain and the temperature had dropped a couple of degrees. It would be a good time to set up on the apartment. Since the report didn’t have a phone number for Lavolet, and since he could no longer call the FBI office to get one, Vail had only two options: The first was to try to get into the apartment, which, if Tye and Radek were there, could be disastrous. The other was to surveil it and see if any lights came on once it got dark.
The building had four units and two of them already had lights on when he got there. Benny’s windows—assuming that 2W was the westernmost apartment on the second floor—showed no signs of life. He waited another half hour and still the unit remained dark.
Deciding to read the Bureau of Prisons report in full to see if there were any more associates of Radek in the area, Vail opened the laptop and turned it on. He took notes in case there were others who might have since moved to the L.A. area. But, as far as known addresses, Lavolet’s was the only one. Vail was about to shut off the computer when suddenly it beeped. It was an incoming message—from Tye Delson.
It was a streaming video of her. But it couldn’t be from her cell phone, because Radek had smashed it, plus there was no sound. Then he remembered her PDA. He had e-mailed some information to it for the search warrant at the steam laundry.
The angle of the image indicated that it was being taken by her, possibly from down at her side. It was shooting up at her face. A piece of duct tape was securely across her mouth, a second across her eyes. Somehow she had managed to pull up one corner, enough to have limited vision out of one eye. A trickle of blood from her nose had dried on her upper lip. The exposed eye was wide with fear, but Vail thought he detected something else—rage. If her condition wasn’t disturbing enough, Vail could see a thin slice of her shoulder and chest. She appeared to be naked.
Then she pulled the device down behind her back as it flickered on and off indicating the battery was low. He saw the unmistakable double strand of a handcuff around one wrist, and then a chain with a padlock that hung from it and was attached by a second lock to a heavy radiator. On the floor was her purse, its contents scattered. Radek must not have known about her PDA, if he even knew what one was.
The camera moved to the window and showed the surrounding neighborhood. The image flickered again, this time the black screen lasting a second or two. An ornate two-story building seemed to be the target of her effort. It was distinctive and apparently the best clue she