Poison Flower

by Thomas Perry

  She continued around the house, looking inside. She knew she could break a window, reach a latch, and slip inside without worrying about the alarm going off. If he was gone, that would be safe, but she sensed something was wrong. She picked up a fallen branch from beneath a tree in the yard, cleaned it of twigs, tied her rope around it, stood to the side of the balcony, and threw it over both railings so it dangled free on the other side without hitting anything and making noise. She reached up and removed the stick, tied the two parts of the rope into a slipknot, tugged it to tighten it, and began to climb. As she did, she used her arms more than usual to save her right leg. When she was just below the balcony she reached up, clutched the edge, and pulled herself up to grasp the railing. She braced her left foot against the wall of the house, used the railing to climb up, and stepped over it onto the concrete surface of the balcony. Then she pulled the rope to bring the knot up to her, untied it, drew up the rest of the rope, and left it coiled on the balcony where it wouldn't be seen from below.

  She leaned close to the double doors on the balcony and stared in at the master suite. There was a king bed with gauzy covers and two long pillows. She moved to look from the left side of the left door along the wall to the closed bedroom door, then beyond it toward the right, when she saw the spring gun aimed at the inner side of the bedroom door on the far side of the room from her.

  It was a pump shotgun set up on a table using a bench rest designed for zeroing in a rifle at a range. There was a thin wire running across the closed bedroom door, through an eyebolt screwed into the woodwork on the wall beside the door, through another one in the wall behind the shotgun, then attached to a piece of wood set inside the trigger guard just in front of the trigger. When the door opened, the shotgun would blast the intruder at the height of the table, about thirty inches above the floor. For someone standing upright, the blast would hit the lower abdomen. It was a prolonged, painful death.

  Jane stayed at the double door on the balcony studying the room to spot signs of more traps. She saw nothing, so she slid the blade of her knife between the two doors, lifted the latch, then stepped aside and placed her back to the wall before she tugged the right door open.

  She remained still and listened. There was no gunshot, no sound of an alarm system, no low growl of a dog that he'd locked in. She leaned in far enough to see all sides, but kept her feet planted until she was sure there was no threat in this room but the spring gun. She stepped carefully to the shotgun, clicked the safety in so the red stripe disappeared, removed the piece of wood from the trigger guard, and let the wire go slack.

  The spring gun had been aimed at the closed door that led out of the bedroom to the hallway. She stepped to the door and listened. She stepped back a pace. Something was wrong. There was no sound out there. Nobody was on the other side waiting for her, but she sensed that the spring gun she had disarmed couldn't be all. That wasn't the way this man thought. He was a murderer who had framed his victim's husband for the murder and then tried to get him killed in prison. One strike, one murder, one trap would not be enough for him.

  As she thought, she knew what it must be. There would be a second spring gun in the hallway, aimed at the outside of the bedroom door. If she entered the bedroom through the balcony doors, as she had, she would see the spring gun in the bedroom and disarm it, and then confidently open the door. The second spring gun, the one in the hallway that she had never imagined, would go off and kill her. If instead she had entered the house another way and come along the hallway toward the bedroom door, she would disarm the spring gun in the hallway and then be killed by the one trained on the door from inside the bedroom. It was a simple, elegant way to build a booby trap: disarming the first gun didn't make you safe; it made you only a confident victim of the second.

  She used her knife to unscrew the doorknob and remove it from the inside, then pushed the outer knob out of its hole and let it fall to the floor in the hall.

  Through the circular hole where the doorknob had been mounted, she could see the dimly lit hallway. Exactly as she had predicted, there was a second table with a shotgun mounted on a bench rest, aimed at her. She followed the trip wire with her eyes. It ran from the piece of wood in the trigger guard to an eyebolt screwed into the surface of the table behind the shotgun, and then straight to the bedroom door. Since the door opened inward, any attempt to open it would pull the trigger and kill the person coming out of the bedroom.

  Jane studied the spot where the wire led to the door, then worked with her knife to carve away the wood from that part of the door. It was taking time, but Jane had already determined that Daniel Martel wasn't here. If he showed up now, she would hear his car through the open balcony doors. She kept working until her blade scraped the screw end of the eyebolt. When she freed the bolt from the door, she heard a clink. She put her eye to the hole and saw the bolt and the slack trip wire on the floor.

  She pulled the door open and walked to the shotgun. She pushed the safety on and continued down the hall. There were four more bedrooms up here, but none of them had any furniture. There were just polished hardwood floors and spotless white walls.

  Because stairways were easy places to plant booby traps, Jane used great care in descending to the first floor. She kept her feet on the outer edges of the stairs, where she could see what she was stepping on. When she reached the bottom, she found an insulated wire and followed it to a pressure pad Martel had installed under the runner on one of the steps.

  She could feel the man's mind at work. He had a problem. He had murdered a woman and framed the woman's husband. The husband was always the easiest one to get the police to accept, because most female murder victims were killed by male family members or friends. Probably Martel had always planned to have the husband murdered in prison, because as long as the framed man was alive, someone might take a second look at the crime. When Jane had taken Jim Shelby away from him, he had sent eight men after her, and this must have struck him as no more than prudent. She had buried the eight, and disappeared again. Clearly he was now aware that she was coming for him, and he was retreating and leaving booby traps in his wake, not staying to wait for her.

  She searched, moving methodically through Daniel Martel's house from room to room, opening all the spaces where things might be hidden. She searched for photographs of Daniel Martel. She searched for medicines in the cabinets that might indicate a chronic illness or an addiction. She examined the figurative paintings to see whether any of the landscapes might be pleasant places he had visited once and might return to if he felt he had to lie low for a period of time.

  When she had been everywhere on the ground floor, she climbed the stairs again to look in the master suite. She opened the walk-in closet and the lights went on auto-matically. The poles where clothes were hung had been disarranged, with some clothes taken and the other hangers pushed to the sides. She studied the clothes that remained to see whether he had been searching through the cold-weather clothes, taken hiking boots or beach sandals, taken expensive suits and shoes or left them. To her it appeared that he had left out the extremes. Judging from the locations of the empty hangers, he had apparently taken something from the jeans section, several shirts, a couple of sport coats, and a windbreaker or light jacket. The shoes were in rows of small cubbyholes. There seemed to be a pair of sneakers or running shoes gone, and a pair of dress shoes, probably brown, since that was the color of the others in that row.

  She pushed some hangers aside. There was a compartment built into the back wall. It wasn't a safe, just a doorless cabinet that must have been hidden by a set of shelves on rollers that he had pushed aside. She looked inside to see if she could determine what he had chosen to take. There was an empty envelope with the return address of the West Valley Bank printed on it, the kind a teller would offer if you withdrew too much cash to carry in a pocket. There was a second envelope, this one with the return address of the county clerk in Dayton, Ohio. The name of the addressee had apparently been
typed on a sticker, and it had been torn off. The receipt inside said that it was for a duplicate of a birth certificate, but not the name of the baby. There was another envelope that was from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and said, "Do Not Forward." It had to be a credit card he'd ordered in a false name.

  He was running, and that put him in a world she knew better than he did.

  She took her rope from the balcony, closed the doors, went down the stairs, and stepped across the never-occupied living room and out the front door. When she reached her car, she started it and drove to the first freeway entrance and turned north. At this hour, it would only take a few minutes to reach the 101 freeway, and then the junction with the 134. In an hour she'd be nearly to the edge of the desert at Victorville, and she would be in Las Vegas by morning.

  19.

  Daniel Martel seemed to Jane to be someone who went to some trouble to be unreadable. His house in Los Angeles wasn't a home; it was an investment. It had expensive paintings but no books, no old clothes, no magazines, no computer, and no personal effects. It was a place for him to stay while he was in Los Angeles without having to be visible or sign a hotel register. It was also a place to store some of his wealth. And real estate was the easiest commodity to manipulate-to give equal credibility to either a big profit or a big loss, whichever he wanted. Martel had apparently never before been close enough to danger to need to run. But Martel was cagey, cunning.

  He'd had enough imagination to foresee the possibility that if he kept making money through criminal acts, he might someday have to run. Maybe when he was with Susan Shelby, he had seen in her whatever quality it was that ultimately had made him kill her, and prepared. Maybe she was a talker, who might reveal his business. It might have been as simple as Susan getting irritating, and Martel beginning to think about what beginning a future without her might require. Jane was aware that Martel was psychologically sophisticated. His simple booby trap had been dangerous because it displayed acute attention to how the human mind worked.

  But he was still a novice at running. He had not had time to think through the predicament of a runner and invent strategies for each obstacle. He would drive to Las Vegas-almost certainly, he had done so as soon as he'd realized his hired men must be dead-and collect whatever he thought he needed. The Las Vegas condominium would be another place for Jane to learn more about him.

  She rechecked the two Beretta pistols she was carrying, put one in her jacket, and put the other under the seat. She drove as fast as she could without attracting the police. The drive to Las Vegas was a long roller coaster-an incline that rose five thousand feet to the Cajon Pass, then a descent into the edge of Death Valley at sea level again, then a couple of smaller ups and downs, ending at two thousand feet on the Las Vegas Strip. She was driving outside the fence past the taxiway at McCarron Airport when the sun rose. The look of everything-blinding and sun-bleached with a promise of cruel heat just outside the car window-reminded her of the morning only a few weeks ago when she'd been wounded, alone on foot with no money, no food, no water, no name. Things were so different now that as the two impressions merged, she felt stronger and more determined.

  She knew approximately where Daniel Martel's condominium was. The address included the name Silverstrike Club, and she remembered seeing a building with that name on it just east of the Strip. She looked it up on her laptop and saw that it was between a midsize hotel and a nightclub. There were a couple of pools and a nine-hole golf course behind it.

  The problem was going to be getting inside to the upper floors where the condominiums were. Las Vegas was an island in a river of cash, so it was full of people who had come to steal. It was, consequently, also heavily populated with security technicians, guards, rent-a-cops, and others whose job it was to prevent incursions by the thieves. It would be best to assume she was always under surveillance.

  There was little time for the things she would have to accomplish here, so she started immediately. She drove to the hotel beside the Silverstrike Club, checked in wearing her short blond wig, and then went out shopping for a dress. The Forum at Caesar's was close, and at its heart was a collection of high-end stores for women. She spent an hour finding the right dress, purse, and shoes, and returned to her hotel with enough time to take extraordinary pains with her hair, makeup, and accessories.

  She was a bit thinner than she had been when she'd gone to get Jim Shelby out of the courthouse, so she supposed she looked more appealing by Las Vegas standards than she had before she'd been shot and starved. Before she left the room, she made sure the marks that Wylie and his friends had made on her were hidden by her long sleeves and high neckline.

  As she walked the two hundred feet to the front entrance of the Silverstrike Club, she could feel the drying and tightening as the surface moisture of her skin was seared away by the sun. The white building was about twenty stories high with a broad, roofed-over drive in front like the gigantic hotels on the Strip. Jane stepped inside, heard the automatic door swing closed behind her, and felt the refrigerated air embrace her. The lobby was an empty marble cavern except for a wide concierge desk with a woman in a man's sport coat standing behind it. Jane approached and said, "Hello."

  "Good afternoon." The girl was as well trained and disciplined as an acrobat. Her smile was an artful blend of dental bleaching techniques and willpower. "How can I help you this afternoon"

  "I'm supposed to meet Mr. Martel for lunch at one. Can you please call him for me"

  "Of course." The voice was lilting. There was nothing in the range of human activities that she would rather do. She punched numbers with a fingernail manicured by a nameless artist. Next came the moment when the eagerness was replaced by uncertainty. She hung up. "He's not answering." She had already filed this incident in the archives of thoughtless errors men commit. Her left eyebrow gave a twitch of commiseration. "Would you like to wait for him in the bar"

  Jane looked only mildly surprised by his absence, but certainly not ready to disregard the slight. She glanced at her watch with the eye of a prosecutor silently building a case: the time was now entered into the official record. "Well, all right," she said, as though the outcome had been anything but sure.

  "I'll take you there." The girl was around the counter and gliding across the marble floor, so Jane had to move quickly to keep up. The girl reached the door a half step ahead so she could push it open before Jane's progress could be impeded. They entered a space with a large dining room on the left, and a long bar on the right with a liveried bartender wielding a cocktail shaker before a couple of men in polo shirts and shorts.

  Just inside the door was another perfected young woman at a lectern. The concierge whispered something about "Mr. Martel" and "bar." The hostess was launched a few steps toward the bar, turned her head only, and held her hand out to Jane. "I'll watch for him and let him know where you are."

  "Thank you," Jane said. She sat at a small metal table in the bar and took her phone out. She pretended to look down into the display at e-mails or text messages, but she had pressed the button for "camera" and was using the viewer to study the men in the vicinity. There were only about a dozen in the bar, but all of them had taken a moment to watch the concierge, the hostess, and Jane. That was fairly promising.

  As she studied the room through her phone, she thought about what she should do if it all went wrong-if Daniel Martel suddenly walked in. There was no chance he could get across the lobby without being reminded by the concierge that he had a date waiting. The ladies' room was at the end of the space, to the right of the bar. She would probably be able to head into that hallway and follow it all the way to the other side, where the restrooms would be accessible to the dining room. The door to the kitchen was in the same direction, a little farther on. She could slip in, go down the long aisle that was always in the center for waiters to pick up orders, and be out the back door before he had any idea what to do.

  The waiter appeared at her table, and Jane looked up and said, "May I
have an iced tea, please"

  He had barely had time to step away before a new man replaced him, standing above her. "Hi," he said. "Are you waiting for somebody"

  He didn't appear to have been out golfing or swimming. His summer-weight sport coat and jeans could have been work attire in an informal office, but his T-shirt and sandals could not, and his Patek Philippe watch raised the question of whether work was necessary. He was handsome, but in a way that was too old for the way he dressed. She decided to take a chance rather than wait for another one. "Well, I have been waiting, but I'm beginning to wonder whether I should. Being late is manipulative. If I put in the time and effort to wait much longer, I'll have to persuade myself that he was worth it. Then I'll have to be willing to devote more time and effort to him."

  "He sounds very sophisticated."

  "It's not working. I'm just getting irritated."

  He shrugged. "Anger is a passion, and it makes your blood circulate and starts you thinking about him. That's much better than indifference."

  "Not if you want to get laid this year instead of next."

  He threw his head back and laughed. "Good point." He took a fake step away, then stopped, as they both had known he would. He looked back. "If you'd prefer some company while you wait, you might make him jealous."

  "I may as well inflict whatever pain I can. Have a seat."

  He sat at the small table with her, gave a half wave to the waiter, and, while the waiter approached, said, "Is that iced tea"

  She nodded.

  "Two Long Island iced teas." To Jane he said, "You like to trade up, don't you"

  Jane said, "Thanks, but four kinds of liquor and sweet and sour mix"