Remote Control
INCREDIBLE PRAISE FOR
REMOTE CONTROL
AND STEPHEN WHITE
“FUN. WHITE OFFERS ACUTE CHARACTERIZATIONS.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“SMOOTHLY CONTRUCTED.
INTRIGUING AND SUSPENSEFUL.
AN ABSORBING THRILLER.”
—Newport News Daily Press
“A COMPELLING TALE OF INTRIGUE AND MURDER AS CONTEMPORARY AS TODAY’S HEADLINES.”
—Abilene Reporter-News
“FRESH AND COMPELLING. STEPHEN WHITE EXPERTLY WINDS HIS WAY THROUGH THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE.”
—Colorado Springs Gazette
“FASCINATING. COLORFUL.”
—Sunday Oklahoman
“WHITE’S FINEST HOUR. NONSTOP INJECTIONS OF ADRENALINE.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
HIGHER AUTHORITY
“SINISTER AND SCARY.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A POWERFUL PIECE OF STORYTELLING.
TENSE…CHILLING.”
—John Dunning
“ABSORBING, INTRIGUING, CHILLING.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“AS INTRICATE AS IT IS MESMERIZING.”
—Denver Post
“A DAZZLER.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“STEPHEN WHITE SCORES AGAIN…
A CAPTIVATING READ!”
—Milwaukee Journal
“AN INTRIGUING, COMPELLING GRABBER.”
—Boulder Daily Camera
HARM’S WAY
“GRIPPING.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A GENUINE PUZZLE THAT SHOULD KEEP READERS GUESSING.”
—Denver Post
MORE PRAISE…
“TAUT, TIGHTLY-SPOOLED STORY TELLING…DIFFICULT TO PUT DOWN.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“ENGROSSING.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“SUPERB. ONE OF THE BEST THRILLERS OF THE YEAR.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
…AND PRIVATE PRACTICES
“DETECTIVE WRITING AT ITS BEST.”
—West Coast Review of Books
“WHITE WEAVES A NEAR-FLAWLESS WEB OF EVIL.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A CAN’T MISS READ.”
—Larry King
“INTRIGUING. SOLID, SATISFYING ENTERTAINMENT.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
ALSO BY STEPHEN WHITE
Harm’s Way
Higher Authority
Private Practices
Privileged Information
REMOTE CONTROL
Stephen White
A SIGNET BOOK
SIGNET
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,
London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
Published by Signet, an imprint of Dutton Signet,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Previously appeared in a Dutton edition
Copyright © Stephen W. White, 1997
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0911-0
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
to my mother, Sara White Kellas
A good deed never goes unpunished.
—Gore Vidal
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
Remember?
Staging shots come first.
A baggage carousel spins empty.
Monitor screens direct deplaning passengers to the destination of their luggage.
A page echoes overhead. “Mr. Singh, Mr. J. Singh” is wanted at the white courtesy telephone, please. The noise level in the room jumps suddenly as the escalators spill a couple of jets full of people into baggage claim. Individual voices are lost in the white noise of travel. Automatic doors open with a swoosh and the drone of a diesel momentarily drowns out all other sounds.
The woman’s camera finds a man wearing khaki Dockers and a plaid wool sport coat. He is exactly where he told her he would be. The man is taller than everyone who passes by. His hair is blond and full; not long, barely reaching his collar. His right arm hangs straight down his side, pressed against his ribs. Although he knows she is there recording him, he does not look toward the lens.
The camera stays with him for a full minute. When Geraldo times it, he pegs it at 59.28 seconds.
Finally, in apparent recognition of something, the man’s passive face brightens and his eyes widen. The woman follows his gaze across the big room, her lens freezing on the bottom steps of the escalator.
Unscuffed black flats. Faded blue jeans. Long slender legs.
One step up, one step down.
Now, brown oxfords, pressed corduroys, nice socks.
The camera glides upward and finds their faces. The woman is much younger than her companion, maybe twenty to his fifty. They seem happy, smiling. One of the disparate sounds on the tape seems to be her infectious laugh. Both the man and the woman have a carry-on bag slung over one shoulder.
She grabs his sleeve to slow him while she steals a glance at the monitor.
The man in the Dockers already knows where they are heading and he calmly strides over to wait for everyone’s arrival in front of carousel number three.
The camera follows him there and pauses. The focus fades, then sharpens. His right arm continues to hang stiffly.
The baggage carousel groans and jerks to life. The travelers are momentarily distracted from their conversations. At first no luggage emerges from the black cave at the top of the stainless-steel slide.
The man stands immobile, calm. The lens shifts away from him and follows the bags as they spill from the mouth of the machine, scratching down stainless steel, stopped by rubber bumpers.
The older man in the corduroys and the young woman in the jeans step in front of the carousel, momentarily filling the camera’s lens. Focus jumps back to the man in the Dockers as his left hand snakes inside the right lapel of his coat.
He steps toward the carousel. Two steps, not too close, not too far.
The crowd is three-deep in places. The passengers are jockeying for position, everyone’s eyes peeled for suitcases and garment bags.
The man’s left arm emerges from the wool jacket and briefly there’s the glint of metal.
One more
stride, another.
Suddenly a woman wearing a red coat fills the screen. For a few long seconds the camera records nothing but the color red.
Blam. Blam.
Two shots are unmistakable on the sound track.
The red coat drops off the bottom of the screen.
The camera jerks around—up, too high, down—trying to locate the gunman. People fall to the floor. An instant of silent shock creates a hollow of hope before a chorus of screams fills the air.
The woman wearing the red coat is at the gunman’s feet, staring straight up at his left hand. In a sweet, plaintive gospel refrain, she calls out, “Oh Lord, he’s got a gun. Oh Lord, Oh Lord. He’s got a gun.”
The man in the corduroys has collapsed onto the carousel, his head on a Samsonite duffel. He is on his side, facing the camera. His white polo shirt is marred by two dark circles, one on his abdomen, the other up toward his shoulder. The circles appear too small to be serious wounds. They are no bigger than dimes.
His expression is one of shock, not pain.
The young woman with him turns to face the shooter. Her amber hair is tied back on the side of her head. Her sunglasses are askew and she rips them off.
The camera zooms and captures the resolve in her blue eyes. She doesn’t cower from the threat. Instead she moves in front of her bleeding companion and spreads her arms as though to shield him. She is facing the gunman—facing down the gunman—and she is willing to take the next bullet.
It’s in her face. It’s in her eyes.
She’s willing to take the next bullet.
The shooter knows it. His finger squeezes but he can’t quite complete the pressure on the trigger to release the next shot.
He can’t shoot her. He’s not here to shoot her.
The carousel continues its clockwise rotation as a young man wearing a University of Georgia Bulldogs sweatshirt flies into the frame from offscreen, delivering a devastating tackle that flattens the assassin, separating him from his weapon.
The carousel comes back around.
The young woman is holding the man’s head in her lap, kissing his face, saying, “I love you, Daddy, I love you, Daddy.”
ONE
Friday, October 11. A few minutes before 7 P.M.
Heavy Snow, 22 Degrees
A car crawled into Lauren Crowder’s view.
Below her, the street descended steeply. At the bottom of the hill the car’s headlights brightened the falling snow with blunt tunnels of light. When the vehicle stopped, she guessed that it was about halfway down the block on the far side of the road.
Originally her plan had been to go back up the driveway and wait in the shelter of Emma’s front porch. Now she wasn’t sure she would have time to make it that far. Instead she watched the street, readied herself, and waited.
The headlights snapped off in a blink, the extinguishing of two vanilla flames. The driver’s door opened and the dimmer glow of the dome bulb flashed on, then off. The silhouettes vaporized and the car and driver disappeared in the mosaic of the storm.
Lauren held a gloved hand, the left one, out in front of her at arm’s length, her fingers spread, and tried to count her digits. She couldn’t. Her anxiety sharpened. She rationalized, trying to write off the visual difficulty to the effects of the storm. She forced her focus to drift above her fingertips, beyond her outstretched hand, back down the street in front of her, so she could have even a prayer of seeing the approaching shadow she was certain would soon appear out of this thick fog of snowflakes.
The shadow would be coming for Emma Spire. Lauren wasn’t going to have time to get back up Emma’s slick driveway.
She threaded the index finger of her right hand through the trigger guard of the handgun she held by her side. Her shoulder was beginning to sag from the drag of the weapon’s weight.
Her anxiety was abating now, her pulse slowing. That surprised her. Until this moment she had been ambivalent about the wisdom of her decision to come here tonight to protect Emma, unsure of the true meaning of the voice-mail message she had heard earlier.
Reminding herself, again, to focus on the present danger, she narrowed her attention to the street in front of her and waited for a man to appear from the frozen mist or to make a telltale sound as he approached.
There.
A flutter of darkness in the sea of white. Like flotsam. There for only a second, then gone, as though it had settled behind an ocean swell.
That was him.
Was it?
How close? Fifty feet? Seventy-five?
Loud enough to be heard over the wind gusting with the storm, she yelled, “Go away. Leave her alone. I have a gun.”
Over the thunder of the pounding of her heart, she thought she heard a grunt in response.
Oh God.
“I mean it. I’m serious. Go away, now. I have a gun. I’ll shoot. I’ll use it. Leave her alone.”
Would she really use the gun? She wished, desperately, that she could see more clearly.
A dense squall line of snow floated past, and for a moment a narrow seam ripped open in the sheet of white. In that instant, she thought she saw a face framed in a tightly cinched dark blue hood that quickly dissolved into a mask that seemed painted with rage.
She thought the man’s eyes looked like fire.
She was frightened now. The air that entered her nostrils was icy and bit at her membranes like frozen steel.
The terrible mask reappeared. She thought she saw the mouth opening and she waited for the spectral figure to speak. In the twisted features of the face she saw the devil’s own brand of rage, but instead of words, she heard a scream, something primitive and guttural and unintelligible.
Oh God.
A fresh gust of wind-whipped snow blew shut the tiny window of clarity and she felt the space narrow.
In fear, she raised her hand, the right hand, the one with the gun. She waited a moment, then raised the weapon farther.
There, that’s high enough.
She watched. She listened.
She blinked away the snow.
Unsure, she tilted the barrel higher. The slope of the terrain was invisible to her. A bright spot—a distant light?—filled her vision. She aimed there, toward that spot.
That has to be high enough.
She was terrified now. A knot of pressure filled her gut.
Suddenly, the clap of a gunshot exploded in her ears, the flash reflecting off the snow the way candlelight dances off the facets of cut crystal.
The blast startled her.
The gunshot, she could tell from the kick, must have come from the weapon she was holding.
Was that high enough?
Her ears were buzzing as though her muffs were filled with a swarm of bees. The snowflakes seemed to sizzle as they vaporized on the hot barrel of the pistol she held in her hand.
Except for the torrent of snow, everything around her had again grown quiet, the wind had stopped swirling, and the air had ceased its frantic howl.
She continued to hold the gun perpendicular to her body, her left hand raised now to support the right. She made one more examination of the road in front of her. She saw no one. She removed her finger from the trigger guard and, without bending her elbow, lowered her arm until the snout of the gun was again pointing lazily at Emma’s driveway.
She scanned the direction where the gun had been aimed and searched for signs of danger. Nothing seemed to be moving except the tiny white pellets that were dropping from the sky by the millions.
Huddled in her heavy coat in the shadow of a brick pillar at the end of Emma’s driveway, she imagined herself a gargoyle, offering her new friend protection from evil.
She wondered if the masked figure had, indeed, been Emma’s adversary. Had he turned and run? God, she hoped so. But she knew that he hadn’t left the neighborhood; the door of the car down the block hadn’t opened again. The engine hadn’t started.
Where was he?
She decided to retur
n to her original plan, to take the high ground, and the advantage. With her weapon still at her side, she backed up the steep driveway. She progressed slowly, taking careful steps, her leather-soled boots having trouble finding purchase on the ice-slick slope.
Barely two minutes later the headlights of a vehicle lit the road down the hill. She paid scant attention to the new car until it stopped in what seemed to be the middle of the street.
She heard the sound of the car door opening and, seconds later, closing. The car pulled forward—what?—twenty feet, twenty-five, it was hard to tell from the erratic movement of the headlights—then reversed itself. Again the driver’s door opened, this time remaining ajar enough to leave the interior lights glowing for a while. To Lauren, every image was refracted and distorted, either too bright or too dark.
Finally, the car backed the rest of the way down the block, turned around, and headed out of the neighborhood. Lauren figured the driver had been lost, looking for an address obscured by the storm.
No more than five minutes later, an emergency vehicle, blue and red lights flashing, fishtailed around the corner and edged up the hill. Through the blinding snow Lauren struggled to see what was happening.
A patrol car pulled to a stop in the middle of the block, its sidemounted searchlights compounding the reflected glow. The beacons on top of the car continued to rotate, bathing the stark scene in a lurid splash of primary colors.
Two car doors opened and Lauren heard voices, male voices, and the dull drone of police-radio chatter. Momentarily, she forgot about the man who might be sneaking up on Emma. She wanted to know why the cops were on the block. Why now?
Had someone reported the gunshot already?
From the opaque white field, rhythmically streaked with sharp flares of color, came an excited young voice. “They were right, Lane. Shit, there is a body down here. Get an ambulance, get an ambulance. Damn, I think it’s bad. Get a blanket or something.”