The Crooked Staircase, Page 2

  When she did as told, Sara’s gaze fixed on a nearby drawer that held cutlery, including a chef’s French knife and a cleaver.

  “Unless you’re a champion knife thrower,” the stranger said, “you’ll never be fast enough to use it. Didn’t you hear me say I don’t mean you any harm?”

  Sara turned from the cutlery drawer. “Yeah, I heard. But I don’t believe it.”

  The woman regarded her in silence for a moment and then said, “If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll warm up to me. If you’re not that smart, this will get ugly when it doesn’t need to be. Sit down at the table.”

  “What if I just walk out of here?”

  “Then I’ll have to hurt you a little, after all. But you’ll have brought it on yourself.”

  The intruder’s face—the strength of its features, the clarity of its lines, its refinement—was as purely Celtic as any face in Scotland or Ireland. But those eyes, so black that the pupils and irises were as one, seemed to belong in a different countenance. The contrast was somehow unsettling, as if the face might be a mask, its every expression unreliable, while the truth that otherwise might be read in her eyes remained secreted in their darkness.

  Although Sara had promised herself that she would never again be intimidated by anyone, after a brief staring match, she sat where she’d been told to sit.

  2

  The tropical stillness of the storm succumbed to a sudden wind that cast shatters of rain against the windows.

  Jane Hawk sat across from Sara Holdsteck and put her Heckler & Koch .45 Compact on the kitchen table. Sara looked weary, which was not surprising, considering all that she had been through in the past two years. Weary but not defeated. Jane was familiar with that condition.

  “Your Springfield Champion is a sweet weapon, Sara. But don’t carry it in your purse. Change the way you dress. Get in the habit of wearing a sport coat. Carry the gun in a concealed shoulder rig where you can draw it quickly.”

  “I hate guns. It was a big step for me just to get one.”

  “I understand. But switch to a shoulder rig anyway. And get real about security systems like the one you had installed here.”

  Skirling wind rattled rain hard against the glass, disquieting Sara, so that she looked at each of the two kitchen windows as if she expected to see some face of inhuman configuration, conjured by the storm.

  Returning her attention to Jane, she said, “Get real about my security system? What’s that mean?”

  “Do you know that all alarm companies in any city or region use the same central station to monitor the systems they install?”

  “I thought each company monitored its own.”

  “Not the case. And certain government agencies have secret—basically illegal—back doors to all those central stations across the country. Do you understand what I mean by ‘back doors’?”

  “A way into the company’s computer the company doesn’t know about.”

  “I used a back door to your security provider and reviewed your account. Learned where your alarm keypads and motion detectors are located, the password you use when you accidentally trigger an alarm and call in a cancellation, the location of the battery that backs up the system during a power failure. Useful stuff for any bad guy to know. Though he’d still need the four-digit disarming code.”

  Two words belatedly brought a scowl to Sara’s face. “ ‘Government agencies’? I’ve had enough of them. Which are you with?”

  “None. Not anymore. Sara, the alarm company isn’t supposed to have that disarming code. It’s something only the homeowner should know. You should program it yourself with the primary keypad. But like a lot of people, you didn’t want to bother following the steps in the manual, so you asked the installer to program it for you. Which he did. And noted it in your account file. Where I found it.”

  As if the weight of her mistake pressed on her, Sara slumped lower in her chair. “I’ve been living defensively for a long time, but I don’t claim to be perfect at it.”

  “Maybe you need to be better, but you don’t want to be perfect at it. Only the insane are perfect in their paranoia.”

  “Sometimes I think I’ve already gone half-crazy, the way I live. I mean, the worst happened more than two years ago. Nothing since.”

  “But in your gut, you know…at any time he might decide you’re a loose end that needs to be tied off.”

  Sara glanced again at the windows.

  “Would you like to lower the blinds?” Jane asked.

  “I always do when I come home after dark.”

  “Go ahead. Then sit down again.”

  Having closed the blinds, Sara returned to her chair.

  Jane said, “I got in here using an automatic lock-picking gun supposedly sold only to police. Turned off the alarm with your code, reset it in the at-home mode, and settled down to wait.”

  “I’ll change the code myself. But, who are you?”

  Instead of answering, Jane said, “You were on top of the world, selling high-end houses, damn good at it, never a complaint from a client. Then suddenly you’re hit with three very public lawsuits, all within two weeks, alleging fraudulent activities.”

  “The allegations weren’t true.”

  “I’m aware of that. Then came a seemingly unrelated IRS audit. But not an ordinary audit. One conducted with the assumption of criminal intent, accusations of money laundering.”

  The memory triggered indignation that drew Sara up straight in her chair. “The IRS agents who came to pore through my books, they were armed. As if I was some dangerous terrorist.”

  “Armed auditors aren’t supposed to flaunt their weapons.”

  “Yeah, well, they made damn sure I knew they were packing.”

  “To intimidate you.”

  Sara squinted as if to focus more intently on Jane’s face. “Do I know you? Have we met before?”

  “Doesn’t matter, Sara. What matters is that I despise the same people you despise.”

  “Like who would that be?”

  From a jacket pocket, Jane produced a photograph of Simon Yegg and dealt it across the table as if it were a playing card.

  “My husband,” Sara said. “Ex-husband. The vicious shit. I know why I despise him, but why do you?”

  “Because of the crew he hangs with. I want to use him to get to them. In the process, I can make him profoundly sorry he did to you what he did. I can humble him.”

  3

  Tanuja Shukla was standing in the deep front yard, in the rain and the dark, soaked and chilled and lonely and wildly happy, when the assassins arrived, although of course she didn’t at once realize they were assassins.

  Twenty-five and obsessively creative from early childhood, Tanuja had been writing a novelette in which a rain-drenched night provided atmosphere but also served as a metaphor for loneliness and spiritual malaise. After watching the downpour from a window of her second-floor study, she seized the opportunity to immerse herself in the elements, the better to know what her lead character felt during a long journey on foot in a storm. Other writers of literary fiction with elements of fantasy found most research unnecessary, but Tanuja believed that a skeleton of truth needed to provide the structure underlying an author’s muscular invention—the fantasy—and that the two must be bound together by tendons of accurate facts and well-observed details.

  Her twin brother, Sanjay, who was two minutes younger than Tanuja and considerably more acerbic, had said, “Don’t worry. When you die of pneumonia, I’ll finish writing your story, and the last pages will be the best of it.”

  Tanuja’s jeans and black T-shirt were saturated, at first clinging like one of those weighted blankets meant to alleviate anxiety, but then seeming to dissolve so that she felt as if she were unclothed except for her blue sneakers, naked in the storm, vulnerable and a
lone, exactly how the character in her novelette felt. As she mentally catalogued the physical details of this experience for later use in fiction, she was more content than she had been all day.

  The house stood at the end of a two-lane road, on three acres in the eastern hills of Orange County horse country, though there were no longer horses on this acreage. White-painted wire-infilled board fencing encircled the property. Sixty or seventy yards west of the house, a gate of the same materials barred entrance to the long driveway.

  The stormfall drummed the earth and chattered like an infinite number of tumbling dice against the blacktop, and on a nearby hundred-year-old live oak, each of the thousands of stiff oval-shaped leaves was a tongue that gave voice to the rain, raising a chorus of whispers that together were like the roar of a distant crowd, all serving to mask the sound of an approaching engine.

  Because the Shukla place was the last residence before the blacktop dead-ended in a turnaround, the light approaching from the south tweaked Tanuja’s curiosity. No visitor was expected. In the murk, the seemingly soundless conveyance appeared to be borne on a tide of mist that roiled off the pavement, headlights chasing before them flocks of shadows that winged across eucalyptus trees on the farther side of the two-lane road.

  The vehicle halted at the gate, not facing inward but athwart the driveway, as though to block that exit from the property.

  When doors were thrown open, interior lights came on, defining the proportions of a large SUV. The driver doused the headlights, and when the last door closed, the vehicle as good as vanished.

  Tanuja had stood so long in the deluge that her eyes were fully dark adapted. Because the plank gate was painted white, she could see it even at that distance, less as a gate than as some pale and cryptic symbol, a mysterious hieroglyph floating portentously on the night. She also discerned three half-visible figures clambering over that barrier.

  Outside of the gate stood a call box on a post. Visitors were meant to press a button and announce themselves, whereupon the gate could be opened from the house. That these new arrivals eschewed the call box and instead climbed the planking suggested they were not visitors, but intruders bent on mischief or worse.

  In her dark clothes, with her black hair and maiden-of-Mumbai complexion, Tanuja would be difficult to spot as long as she avoided the outspill of light from the house. She turned and dashed to the massive oak, which gathered rain and channeled it along leafways, from which it drizzled in a hundred thick streams.

  She paused and glanced back and saw three big men hurrying up the driveway, their hooded jackets and determined stride suggesting satanic monks abroad on some infernal task.

  Hers was not a life of high drama, other than the scenarios that arose in her mind and found expression in her writing. She had not before experienced such hard pounding of the heart as shook her now, as if contained within her breast were both hammer and anvil.

  She sprinted from the oak and around the south side of the house, staying clear of the light from the windows. Onto the back porch. Two doors. The first opened into the kitchen, the second into the mudroom, but of course both were locked.

  She fumbled a key from a pocket, dropped it, snatched it from the porch floor, and let herself into the mudroom, where she had left her smartphone before venturing into the storm. Slender and athletic, Tanuja was usually as graceful as a dancer. But now, shedding rainwater, she slipped on the vinyl-tile flooring and fell.

  A door on the left connected the mudroom to the kitchen, and one directly ahead accessed the downstairs hallway. She thrust to her feet, sodden shoes slipping as if she were a skater on ice, and opened the door and saw Sanjay. He had stepped out of his study and gone into the foyer at the farther end of the hallway, where he just now opened the front door.

  Too late to call out a warning, Tanuja hoped that she had misread the situation, that her overactive imagination had invoked menace where none existed.

  The first man at the door was known to her: Lincoln Crossley, who lived two houses south of them, a deputy with the sheriff’s department. Linc was married to Kendra, who worked as a bailiff at the county courthouse. They had a sixteen-year-old son, Jeff, and a Labrador retriever named Gustav. They were good people, and for a moment Tanuja was relieved.

  Rather than wait for an invitation, however, Crossley and the two men behind him crossed the threshold the moment the door opened, crowding Sanjay backward, their boldness disturbing. None of them wore a uniform, and whoever the two strangers might be, Crossley’s behavior was not protocol for an officer of the law.

  Tanuja couldn’t discern what Linc Crossley said or what Sanjay answered, though she heard the deputy speak her name. She eased the mudroom door almost shut, watching through a narrow gap, feeling like a child, a small uncomprehending girl who by accident stood witness to a mysterious and disquieting adult encounter.

  Crossley put one arm around Sanjay’s shoulders, but in that move Tanuja read some quality darker than neighborly affection. He was much bigger than Sanjay.

  One of Crossley’s associates drew a pistol, quickly crossed the foyer, and ascended the stairs, apparently with no concern that his boots and jacket streamed water on the carpet and the hardwood floor.

  When the third man closed the front door, stepped out of the foyer, and disappeared into the parlor as though on a search, Tanuja opened a drawer in a mudroom cabinet, retrieved a flashlight, grabbed her phone from a countertop, and fled. She crossed the porch, vaulted the railing, and hurried across the backyard, into the wind and rain, not daring yet to switch on the light, her fertile imagination spawning terrors of extreme violence and rape and intolerable humiliation even as it also crafted desperate scenes in which she might by various means save herself and her brother.

  4

  Long-lingering resentment pinched Sara Holdsteck’s mouth and pinked her cheeks, the knuckles bone-white in her clenched fists, as she spoke about what she’d endured more than two years earlier, when she’d been sued by three clients in one week, which turned out to be the least of the assaults against her. Because the woman’s anguish at having been betrayed and played for a fool had not faded with time, Jane found it painful to watch her.

  Sara’s attorney of fifteen years, Mary Wyatt, had assured her that those legal actions were frivolous, that among the accusers there was an appearance of collusion with intent to defame, and that she should not worry unduly. Three days later, with no explanation, Mary dropped her as a client and declined to accept her phone calls. Another attorney took her on—and the following day changed his mind. While a third lawyer tried to persuade her to settle the suits out of court, a six-unit apartment building that she owned appeared on an EPA list of structures standing on ground contaminated by highly toxic chemicals, and three days thereafter, she received a health-department summons to appear at a hearing into the dangers faced by tenants of her property. By this time, IRS auditors had been in the offices of her accountant for six business days, examining her books in search of evidence of money laundering.

  Now she poked a finger at the photo of Simon Yegg on the table in front of her. “It was a Friday evening. This treacherous snake sat me down for what he called a ‘come-to-Jesus meeting.’ He claimed my problems were the work of friends of his who he wouldn’t name. The smug bastard wanted a divorce. He gave me a property-division ultimatum. He’d keep everything he brought into the marriage just eighteen months earlier…and take seventy percent of my assets, graciously leaving me start-over money. In return, he’d make the lawsuits go away, have the IRS audit conclude quickly in my favor, and get the apartments taken off the list of contaminated sites.”

  “You believed he could do all that?” Jane asked.

  “Everything happening to me was so bizarre, surreal. I didn’t know what to believe. The change in him was shocking. He’d always been so sweet, so…loving. Suddenly he was condescending, cruel, contemptuous
of me. I told him to get out. I said it was my house before we were married and it would always be my house.”

  “What happened to make you back down?”

  Sara looked at one blinded window and then at the other, not because anything of the night could be seen, but perhaps because she was embarrassed to meet Jane’s eyes.

  “I didn’t know he had three people with him. They came in from the garage. Two men and a woman. He gave me to them, and he left.”

  “ ‘Gave’ you to them?”

  Sara opened her fists, regarding her hands as if repulsed by some filth that only she could see. “The men held me down.”

  After a silence, Jane said, “Rape.”

  “No. They stripped me naked. Cuffed my hands. Indifferent. As if I wasn’t a woman to them. Not a person. Just a thing.”

  Her voice had gone flat, deflated of all emotion, as if she had so often examined this memory that she’d worn away its sharp edges and its ability to distress her. But the truth of its enduring effect could be seen in the paleness of her lips, the color burning in her cheeks, and the stiffening of her body as if in defense against a hard blow.

  “They took me to a bathroom,” she continued in a voice eerily detached from the cruelty she described. “The woman had filled the tub with cold water. Also with ice. Cubes from the kitchen icemaker. A lot of ice. They forced me to sit in the tub.”

  “Hypothermia is an effective torture,” Jane said. “Iranians use it. North Koreans. Cubans. When they don’t want to mark the victim.”

  “One man sat on the toilet. One brought a chair. The woman sat on the tub. Edge of the tub. They talked movies, TV, sports, like I wasn’t there. If I spoke, she zapped my neck with a Taser, then held my head out of the water by my hair till the spasms stopped.”

  “How long did this go on?”

  “I lost track of time. But it wasn’t just one session. They did it to me on and off all weekend.”