The Shadow Hunter by Michael Prescott Read Free Book Online Page A

the place offered two features she prized: luxury and security.
    Luxury was on display in the gushing fountain that ornamented the driveway, the gray marble expanse of the lobby floor, the excellent reproduction of Rodin’s
Eve
facing the elevator bank. Security was less obvious. The doorman who greeted her when she headed up the front walkway, toting her carry-on bag, didn’t look like a guard, but under his red blazer the bulge of a shoulder holster could be detected by a practiced eye. The two uniformed men at the mahogany sign-in desk wore their sidearms in plain view, but the array of closed-circuit video screens they monitored was hidden below the desktop.
    “Hey, Abby,” one of them said.
    She smiled. “Vince, Gerry, how’s it going?”
    “Slow day. Have a nice trip?” They thought she was a sales rep for a software firm, on the road a lot.
    “Productive.” She asked if there was a FedEx Same-Day package for her, and they found it behind the counter. She tucked thebox under her arm. It was good to have the gun back. She always felt a little naked without it. “Thanks, guys,” she said with a smile and a wave. “See you.”
    The elevator that carried her to the tenth floor was equipped with a hidden TV camera. The control panel was rigged to set off a silent alarm at the front desk if the elevator was intentionally stopped between floors. There were cameras in the stairwells and in the underground garage, access to which was controlled by a passcard-operated steel gate. The gate, too, was monitored by a surveillance camera. All that was missing was a crocodile-infested moat. She might bring up the idea at the next meeting of the condo board.
    She wasn’t sure these precautions were necessary. By LA standards Westwood was a safe neighborhood. But she took enough chances in her work. She liked having a refuge to come home to.
    Her apartment was number 1015. She opened the door and stepped into her living room, which took up half the floor space in her unit’s thousand-square-foot plan. A faint mustiness hung in the air; the place had been closed up for a week. Otherwise, it was just as she’d left it.
    She dropped her suitcase and the FedEx package onto the ottoman of an overstuffed armchair. The apartment’s furnishings had been chosen primarily for comfort, with no concerns about consistency of style. She liked a chair she could sink into, a sofa softer than a bed. Throw pillows and quilts were tossed here and there, along with the occasional stuffed polar bear and fake macaw, all contributing to a general impression of disorder. Her decorating skills were limited at best, but she had managed to find two paintings that pleased her. Both were prints purchased out of discount bins. One was a late work by Joseph Turner, the landscape dissolving in a bath of light, and the other was one of Edward Hicks’s many studies of
The Peaceable Kingdom
, predator and prey as bedfellows. The Turner had a spiritual quality thattouched a part of her she rarely accessed, and the Hicks, with its naive optimism, simply made her smile.
    Briskly she opened the curtains and the glass door to the balcony, airing out the room. Her apartment faced Wilshire; she was high enough to be out of earshot of most traffic noise.
    In the kitchen she drank two glasses of water. Flying always left her dehydrated. She found blueberries and peaches in the freezer, defrosted them in the microwave, and dumped them into the blender along with a dollop of vanilla yogurt and some skim milk two days past its expiration date. A few seconds of whirring reduced the blender’s contents to a bluish, frothy sludge, which she poured into a tall glass and drank slowly, pausing to swallow assorted vitamin and mineral supplements.
    Leaving the kitchen, she changed into a white terry-cloth robe and ran the bathwater. Briefly she considered pouring bath oil into the tub, but ruled against this indulgence. She was about to strip off the robe when the intercom