He glanced at his watch. Almost two o’clock. Any moment now, he thought, and lifted his camera from a shopping bag, adjusting its zoom lens. As if on cue, Tash stepped onto the escalator that led up from the first level to the second. Coltrane hadn’t expected to have any trouble seeing her. Her magnetic presence would have distinguished her in any crowd. Nonetheless, he was amazed by how immediately he noticed her. By contrast, the two men with her were relatively inconspicuous, one in front, the other in back: Walt’s partner, Lyle, and one of the state troopers whom Coltrane had met the previous afternoon. Both had the day off and had accepted the chance to earn more extra money as her bodyguards. They wore casual clothes and slightly oversized windbreakers that concealed the handguns they carried, their presence reassuring.
Coltrane returned his attention to Tash. Planning today’s strategy, the group had debated whether she should wear something attention-getting to make her easier for him to spot, but they had dismissed the idea as one that would be likely to make her stalker suspicious. Obviously, a woman afraid of being followed wouldn’t want to be conspicuous unless she was trying to bait a trap. Accordingly, they had agreed that she would wear something attractive without being ostentatious: camel slacks, a dark blue blazer, an ecru silk blouse, and modest silver earrings. But as Coltrane looked down at her from the railing of the third level, he now realized that it was impossible for her not to attract attention. Even from a distance, her beauty was manifest. With her hand on the railing of the escalator, her body turned sideways, she looked like a fashion model. As faces on the opposite, descending escalator pivoted in her direction, Coltrane started snapping pictures.
It wasn’t likely that anyone on the descending escalator would be the man he was hunting, but Coltrane didn’t want to take chances – there was no way of telling what he might inadvertently capture in the background. Three shots later, he raised his aim and got pictures of the crowd on both sides of where the escalator came up to the second level. Because he and Tash had verbally rehearsed her movements, Coltrane knew that she would turn toward the right. As a consequence, he moved simultaneously with her, but in the opposite direction, to the left, farther along the railing, able to snap several photographs of her shifting through the crowd below and across from him. A little farther along, he caught her entering a clothing boutique. Even with a zoom lens, it was hard to tell from this distance whether anyone gave her more than the usual admiring glances. No one seemed to be photographing her, but because he was looking mostly through the viewfinder, he couldn’t be sure. The magnified photographs would tell the story.
He changed position, heading to the right this time, to the store above the clothing store that she had entered. From that vantage point, he could look across the huge open space between levels. He could peer down toward the stores opposite the one that Tash had entered. He could see if anyone showed unusual interest in that store. Staying back from the railing so he wouldn’t be obvious, he made sure to change angles, getting as wide a variety of shots as possible.
Once more, he checked his watch. A half hour had passed. As he and Tash had planned, it was time for her to be coming out, so he shifted to the side opposite the door that she and her two bodyguards would be coming through. He caught photographs of the crowd on each side, of anyone who might be watching. Aware that she and her bodyguards would now head toward the down escalator, he reached a spot where he could take photographs of anyone watching from the first level as she and her escorts descended the escalator from the second level.
At the bottom, they moved out of his sight, heading along a corridor of stores toward an elevator that would take them to the parking garage. But by hurrying to the escalator and taking it three steps at a time down to the second level, Coltrane was able to get Tash in sight again and photograph the shoppers in the corridor below him. She entered the elevator. Its doors closed.
His camera clicked on the last exposure. As the rewind motor whirred, he lowered the camera. His back muscles slowly relaxed. But his tension was the result of exhilaration. Working a camera after so long had given him a rush, as had the clandestine nature of the photographs he was taking, the idea that he was trying to trap someone who wouldn’t know that he was being photographed. He wondered if that was the same kind of rush that the stalker got, the power of observing without being observed, of capturing someone’s soul without the target’s being aware that the theft had occurred. Suddenly chilled, he remembered the vulnerability and nakedness he had suffered when he found the photographs that Dragan Ilkovic had taken of him.
4
AS SOON AS THE CAMERA’S REWIND MOTOR FINISHED WHIRRING, he quickly removed the exposed film and put in a new roll. All the while, he calculated. He had to hurry to his car and get to Tash’s next destination, another clothing boutique, this one on the Third Street pedestrian shopping area in Santa Monica. After that, she would go to a similar store in Westwood and finally all the way down to yet another clothing boutique at the South Coast Plaza in Orange County. She owned all of them, he had learned. She also owned three more in San Diego and four in San Francisco.
“I have other investments, too,” she had said while they drove to the Malibu sheriff’s station that morning. “I try to stay out of their day-to-day affairs, but periodically I drop in just to let the managers know Big Sister is watching. In the case of the clothing boutiques, my interest is greater, so I pay visits more often. This afternoon and this evening would be a good time to make my rounds.”
“Do you ever phone your managers to alert them when you’re coming?”
“Always. Granted, it gives them a chance to hide anything that might be wrong, but it also makes me seem less adversarial than if I showed up unannounced, trying to catch them at something. I don’t want the managers to be afraid of me. I want them to work hard for me.”
“This morning, after you get back to your house, why don’t you use the phone to make appointments at the various stores for this afternoon? Add enough time between stops so I can get to each one ahead of you.”
“But what I say will be transmitted through the hidden microphone Walt left in the house. He’ll know my timetable.”
“Exactly,” Coltrane had said. “And we’ll know his.”
With the first phase completed, Coltrane got on the escalator down to the Beverly Center’s bottom level. The time was twenty-five to three. Depending on traffic, Tash needed only a half hour to get to the store in Santa Monica, but since the plan required him to arrive ahead of her, she had added another half hour to the timetable, making a 3:30 appointment with the manager. Tash’s stalker, who had presumably overheard the telephone conversation, wouldn’t expect her until then. Meanwhile, Coltrane would be able to arrive in time to start shooting various angles of the crowd. Of course, Tash’s stalker might decide not to show up at any of the-