Shadow Woman jw-3

by Thomas Perry

  If the woman had been in Buffalo for two weeks, she must have gone there straight from Denver—been sent there from Denver. Earl Bliss had been the designated shooter, and he seemed to have had all the money, so probably he had been the one who made the decisions. He must have been smart enough to know that from the moment Pete Hatcher had seen the woman’s face, she had become a liability. So he had sent her to western New York.

  As Jane followed the path of logic, she felt her stomach tightening. The woman had not simply been excused from the hunt and sent home: she lived in Los Angeles. She had not been bundled off into hiding in a place that just happened to be near Jane’s hometown. They had sent her something there by overnight mail. People in hiding didn’t need anything urgently enough to require that it be sent in a way that left a record.

  Jane tried to invent coincidences that would confute her logic. Had she given Pete any false identities that could have tied him to the western part of New York State? That was impossible. She never sent chasers across her own trail. Did Pete have any close friends or relatives there? When she had asked him about friends and relatives, there had been none east of Nebraska.

  The address in Orchard Park might mean something. Orchard Park wasn’t a big, bustling city where people came and went by the thousand without attracting attention. It was a suburb, a small upper-middle-class bedroom community. It wasn’t a place to remain anonymous. It was a place to establish an identity.

  This woman could not have been sent to spot Pete Hatcher. She was the only member of the team whose face he had seen. There was only one reason Jane knew of for this woman to be in western New York. That night on the mountaintop, when Earl had been deciding how to kill her, he had called her Jane. The woman must have known much more.

  Jane began to sweat. The woman had been there for two weeks. She’d had enough time to find out—what? Where Jane lived, certainly. And that meant she knew who Jane was married to. Jane snatched up the telephone again and inserted her credit card. When she had punched in the area code, she stopped.

  Every time Jane had taken Hatcher in a different direction, Earl had turned up with the rifle. Jane’s throat was dry, and her head was throbbing. She had made some terrible mistakes. The woman had probably found her address in a day, and on the next day had broken into the house and bugged the telephones. Jane had obligingly called every few days, and that had somehow given her a location. Now this woman was waiting in Buffalo, probably watching Carey, and Jane could not even call to warn him, because the woman would be listening.

  Jane forced herself to be calm and tried to think of another way. She could call Carey’s office. No, that was foolish. If the woman had been listening for a call from Jane, she could not have assumed it would come to the house. The woman would also have tapped the lines in Carey’s office.

  Carey was at the hospital right now. There were hundreds of phone lines at the hospital. Tapping into all of them would be a job for a team of electrical engineers, not one person who knew how to plant a bug. Jane searched for a way to use the complexity of the place. Carey would be in surgery for the next couple of hours, where an outside telephone call could not reach him. After that, he would be all over the building, walking the halls to examine and discharge patients, read charts and scribble in files, look at X rays and test results. There was no way to predict precisely where he would be. If the operator didn’t have a pretty clear fix on him, what would she do? She would page him.

  Jane could not let that happen. The person this woman wanted to find was Jane. The woman could not assume that Jane would not show up in person instead of calling. The woman could monitor her telephone taps with a tape recorder, but she would have to watch Carey with her own eyes.

  Suppose Jane didn’t call Carey directly. She could call the nurses’ station in the recovery room. Carey would certainly show up there immediately after surgery, and then again later to clear the patient to be transported to his own room upstairs. But what could Jane say to a nurse? She could hardly ask some stranger to tell Dr. McKinnon he might be in mortal danger because his wife hid fugitives.

  For the moment, Carey was as safe as he could be. Nobody could get into an operating room. The big metal doors wouldn’t open unless someone inside hit a switch on the wall. After that, he would be surrounded by people, going about his business as he had been doing for two weeks while this woman had been watching him.

  The woman had not come to Buffalo to harm Carey McKinnon. There was no extra pay for that. She had come to watch him and use him to find out where Jane was. Carey was only valuable to this woman if he was alive and unsuspecting. He would be safe until … when? The moment when the woman saw Jane.

  She sat strapped in her seat, rigid. Maybe she should not be going home. Maybe the best favor she could do for Carey McKinnon was to stay as far away from him as possible. If she stayed away for long enough, the woman would have to give up and go away. But then Jane realized that she was wrong. If this woman had been keeping Carey in sight for two weeks, then the woman could not be sure that Carey had never caught a glimpse of her, never seen her face. If the woman got tired of waiting, she would not just go away. Before she did, she would put a bullet in Carey’s head.

  Linda stared at the red zero on her answering machine. If Earl had done it and gotten back to civilization by now, he should have left a message for her. But maybe he had called home. There was no question that he would call as soon as he could reach a telephone. He would be thinking about what she might be doing to keep Carey McKinnon occupied, and he would want that to end as soon as possible.

  She dialed the number of her house. The telephone rang once, twice, and then there was an unfamiliar high-pitched tone. A recorded voice that sounded like a middle-aged woman came on and stated authoritatively, “The number you have reached is not in service. If you think you have reached this number in error, please hang up and dial again.” Linda took her advice.

  After the third try, Linda began to feel panicky and worried. Was it possible that in all this traveling she had forgotten to pay a phone bill? Her mind searched for a way to reassure itself, but it came back with nothing. She weighed the danger of calling the long-distance operator in Los Angeles and explaining the problem. She could think of no reason not to, so she did. After a few seconds she was connected with the billing department. The woman on the other end consulted a computer and said, “You’re right. I’m seeing it as out of service. It’s not a billing problem. I’ve already checked your records, and you’re up to date on your payments. But the phone is out of service.”

  “Doesn’t whatever you’re looking at say why?” asked Linda. “I’m expecting a very important call, and if they can’t get through I’m going to be a very unhappy customer.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the woman. “They don’t tell us what the problem is. It could be a lot of things—a malfunction in the equipment in your home, for instance. Or with the line that goes to your house. If a tree on your property fell and pulled it down, I would have no way of knowing from here.”

  “Well, I certainly have no way of knowing from here, do I?” asked Linda.

  “I understand that,” said the woman.

  “Can’t you send somebody to check?”

  “Is there anyone there now to let the repair technician onto the premises?” Linda could tell it was an official question, the sort that brought some rule into play.

  “No.”

  “Then we wouldn’t be able to send anyone, no.”

  Linda closed her eyes and let her voice carry some of the frustration and defeat that she was feeling. “If you were me, what would you do about this?”

  Now that the woman had her victory, she issued a reprisal. “When you go out of town it’s a good idea to leave a key with a friend or relative. You might call a neighbor and ask her to look across the street to see if there’s anything obviously the matter.”

  The defeat was complete. “Yes, thanks,” she said. “Maybe I’ll try that. Good-by
e.” She hung up. Something was very wrong. She goaded her imagination to think of a way to find out what it was from the other end of the continent. She couldn’t call the police and have them check the house, because what they might find would send her and Earl to jail. She and Earl had always been so careful to remain unapproachable and anonymous that she not only had no acquaintances among the people who lived nearby, but she could not now recall any of their names.

  She used her laptop computer to call up the Los Angeles telephone directory Northwest section and scanned it. Finally she called the number of a florist a half mile from her house, ordered a dozen roses to be delivered to Linda Thompson from Earl Bliss, and charged it to the Northridge Detectives credit card number she retrieved from the memory of her computer. She made it sound like an afterthought when she asked to talk to the delivery driver. She heard the man turn his head away from the receiver and shout, “Enrique! Phone!”

  She explained to Enrique, “These flowers are supposed to be a surprise, so it has to be done in a certain way. It’s a house with a high gate. Drive up to the gate. Ring the bell. If anyone is home, give them the flowers. If nobody is home, there’s a great big mailbox right by the gate. Put the flowers inside, so she finds them when she looks for her mail. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” said Enrique. “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” said Linda. “When will you be back from your deliveries?”

  “About an hour from now.”

  “Fine. I’ll call you, because I need to know where you put the flowers. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  A little over an hour later, Linda called again and asked for Enrique. If a line was down, he could hardly have avoided noticing it. If—God forbid—there was a bigger problem, he would have seen something she could interpret. If the time for killing Pete Hatcher had run out and the one waiting in the house was Seaver, or if the house was under police surveillance, somebody would have appeared at the gate to talk to the delivery man. She waited for a minute and a half before Enrique picked up the phone and said, “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t deliver the flowers. The boss says he’ll cancel the order and credit your card for the money.”

  “What do you mean, you couldn’t deliver them?”

  “There’s nothing there. The lady’s house burned down. You want to find where she’s living now, we’ll be happy to deliver them there.” He paused. “Lady?”

  Linda stared at the wall of her apartment, but no words came to her, because her mind was moving too quickly. “No thanks,” she said at last. “Just cancel the order.”

  She tested each of the possibilities. Had it been a simple accident—a short-circuit or something? But why would it happen now? The odds against that were astronomical, with nobody in the house to leave anything turned on. Maybe Earl had failed again, and decided it was time to burn the house with two bodies in it that matched his description and hers. No. That had not been a plan, it had just been talk. Earl never panicked. More likely, he should have done it but hadn’t, and this was Seaver sending them a message.

  What would Earl want her to do now? The answer came to her slowly, in simple, incontestable statements. Earl never gave up. If the house had simply burned by itself, she and Earl would need the money for killing Pete Hatcher more than ever. If Seaver had burned the house, then Earl would want to kill Pete Hatcher so he could add the cost of rebuilding to the fee and make Seaver pay for it. No matter what had happened in California, when Earl came for her, he would want to see some evidence that Linda had been doing what he had told her to do in New York.

  She stood up and began to pack her belongings. When she had finished, she locked her suitcase in the trunk of her car and came back to put the items she would need into her purse. She walked to the door and looked back before she turned off the light. The only thing left in the room that she had brought with her was the telephone answering machine. With the house gone, it could be Earl’s last way to reach her.

  36

  Jane was already standing when the hatch of the plane opened. She lockstepped up the aisle with the others, then broke free and hurried along the accordion tunnel and into Kennedy Airport. She rushed along the concourse, took the escalator two steps at a time, stepped to the ticket counter, and found that there was not a flight to Buffalo until 3:30. She bought the ticket, then walked to the bank of telephones along the opposite wall.

  Jane called the toll-free reservation number of every airline that flew from Kennedy, then worked her way through the ones that left from La Guardia and Newark. Only two airlines had flights that were scheduled to take off earlier than hers, and both were already full. Jane was not surprised. Buffalo was not the sort of place people visited on impulse, so the flights tended to be booked in advance. She would have to wait three hours—no, only two hours, now.

  She used the rest of her time to work the airport shops. She found some leather bomber jackets and selected one a size too big for her. It had big map pockets that started at the belly and ran up her ribs. The jacket would pass as cute if a woman wore it, but the look was decidedly male. The big shoulders and the roomy fit would disguise her shape; the thick, stiff leather would provide a distinct advantage against a knife. Anything metallic she put in the map pockets would serve as body armor. She found a smaller shop that sold monogrammed clothes, picked out a black wool baseball cap, and declined to have it monogrammed. She found a pair of soft black leather gloves. It was often a woman’s hands that gave her away at a distance. She decided the blue jeans she was wearing were sufficiently nondescript, as were the boots she had worn in the mountains.

  The flight to Buffalo took less than an hour, but to Jane it was endless. Carey was out of surgery now, and probably in his office down the street from the hospital. If she wanted to warn him, this was the time. She could avoid his telephones entirely, by calling Jake Reinert. There was absolutely no chance that the woman had tapped Jake’s telephone. She could speak freely to Jake and ask him to go to Carey’s office and tell him in person. The problem was that she still was not sure what to tell Carey to do.

  The woman was a professional, so she would be watching for particular signs, and she would know what she would do if she saw them. What would she do if Carey received a visitor, then abruptly closed his office and left for the day? She would follow him. The answer always seemed to come out the same.

  The plane began its descent just west of Rochester, and in ten minutes it was gliding up the runway at Buffalo International. Jane hurried past the car rental desks and went outside to flag a cab. The woman had been here for two weeks, and it was likely that she had rented a car at the airport. If she had, then she would have come out and seen the three or four fleets of nearly identical cars lined up behind the terminal. When she saw one of those four models in the right color, it was possible she would know the person in it had just come from the airport, and begin to wonder.

  Jane had the taxi driver take her to an agency close to the center of the city, where she rented a Dodge minivan with tinted side and rear windows. If she was going to use it to watch for the woman, then she had to be able to look without having her head visible in the driver’s seat.

  Jane drove up the street toward Carey’s office, her gloved hands clutching the wheel, the collar of her new jacket up, her hair tucked under her hat and a pair of sunglasses over her eyes. She circled the block, trying to take in all of the sights at once. There was nothing out of place. The cars behind the building belonged to Carey’s receptionist and three nurses. As she came up the next street, she noticed that the lights were off in the examining rooms and in the little office where Carey talked to patients. He was gone.

  Jane glanced at her watch. It was five forty-five, and Carey had undoubtedly gone back to the hospital. As she drove past the big white building she admitted to herself that it was getting dark. She would have to take off the sunglasses before she went inside. She had hoped not to need to go inside at all. She didn’t know most of the people who wo
rked in the hospital, so the woman would have a fair chance of picking Jane out of the crowd before Jane noticed her. The few people Jane did know were all old buddies of Carey’s. If she walked in and one of them called, “Jane!” ugly things could start to happen.

  Jane parked her van. She was on the same side of the street as the hospital’s front entrance, so she wouldn’t have to hustle Carey across the open, empty pavement, but the distance was greater than she would have liked. She glanced at her watch again and tried to steady her nerves. This was just like taking a runner out of the world. She had done this before. It should be easy. The doctors always went in and out of the rear entrance, where their reserved parking spaces were. If the woman was watching the car, she would be in the back. Jane would find Carey, push him into an elevator, and lead him to the front door. She would do it about ten minutes before he usually left, get him into the van, and whisk him off to a place where he would be safe.

  Jane walked to the doors with a group who seemed to be relatives of someone who’d had a baby. There were a white-haired couple wearing the benevolent grandparent expression and a young dark-haired man who carried a bouquet of roses in a florist’s vase so that water dripped on his coat. He seemed to be looking through objects rather than at them, while his mind made a rare visit to the realm of philosophy.

  Jane judged that they would make a good camouflage. She opened the door for the parents before the man could transfer the roses to his other hand. He grinned apologetically and she grinned back at him in understanding. She said softly, “Are you a new daddy?” and he nodded proudly. “Congratulations,” she said. She pushed the roses up. “Carry them this way, so the water doesn’t leak out.”