by Thomas Perry
Jane said, "What you told her was true. It may even be what happened."
"But I should have done something different. Maybe I could have gone to visit her, taken her to another city for a few days just to be sure. She's barely twenty, and maybe when it finally came down to it, she couldn't cut herself off."
"You did."
"I wasn't pregnant."
"Sharon, this isn't your fault. It wouldn't have helped for you to rush off and join her in Minnesota. That's exactly what the people chasing her would want—to have you lead them to her."
"I know. It's what I told her. But if something has happened to her, I'll feel terrible."
"Has she tried to call you or e-mail you or anything after the one time?"
"I don't know," Sharon said. "After it happened the first time, I checked just about every hour so I could erase any message before someone else played it. Then I realized that wasn't good enough, so I unplugged my answering machine."
"Good. It also explains why I haven't been able to record a message when I called."
Sharon seemed to awaken from a kind of daze. "Oh, I haven't even offered you anything to drink. Please sit down somewhere, and I'll bring you something."
"No, let's talk," Jane said. "You were too polite to say it, but I'm sure you're wondering why I took the risk of coming here like this. I came because I thought you might have had contact with her. But I was also afraid that something might have happened to you. I think it's time now to make sure nothing does."
"What do you mean?"
"I want you to go away. I want you to go far from here—someplace pleasant and safe. I want you to stay away until school starts. I'll pay for your trip. Your house will have to be closed. There can't be some friend who comes to pick up your mail or water your plants."
"Well, I guess I can do that," said Sharon. "Yes, of course I can. I will."
"Good. I'll help you pack and turn things off and lock up. Then I'll drive you to the airport and make sure you get on a plane."
"Where am I going?"
"How about the northwest? You can stay in Seattle or Portland and use it as a base to explore the area."
"Sounds all right," Sharon said. She went to a closet and pulled out a suitcase, then stopped. "It's bad, isn't it?"
Jane shrugged. "I don't know. She could be somewhere else, perfectly safe."
"But you don't want me to be here while you find out."
"No. I don't."
They stopped speaking and began the work of getting the house ready for an extended period with Sharon away. Jane went into the kitchen and began taking perishable food out of the refrigerator and putting it into a plastic garbage bag. It took Sharon only a few minutes to pack the things she needed and place her suitcase by the front door. By then Jane had taken the garbage out to her SUV and was going from room to room making sure all of the windows were locked.
Jane said, "I see some of the lights are on timers. Is there anything else we need to do here? No pets?"
"No. I just have to cancel the newspaper and fill out a card to put a hold on the mail before we leave."
"All right. I'll see if I can get you a plane reservation."
The mood had turned somber. Jane used her cell phone to get the flight to Seattle while Sharon called the San Diego Union-Tribune to cancel the paper. While Sharon filled out the card for the postal service, Jane asked questions.
"Is there anyone you know of who might be putting Christine up?"
"No. She had friends here, but Richard would have known about all of them, and she knew—at least after I told her—that even calling them might put them in danger. If there is anybody like that it would have to be somebody outside San Diego, and it would have to be somebody that none of us knew about."
"Like me."
"Like you," said Sharon. She paused, then said, "I'd better take one last look around." Sharon went into her room and Jane could hear her for a few minutes, opening and closing drawers, moving hangers in the closet. After a time she came out to find Jane looking in the telephone book. "What are you looking for?"
"The Beale Company," Jane said. "I found it. I didn't find Richard Beale's address, though, and I didn't bring it with me."
"I have it." She went to her kitchen counter and opened a small address book. After she copied an address, she handed it to Jane.
"Thank you." She looked at it for a moment, then said, "This was where Christine lived with him, right?"
"Yes. But I never went over there. When we talked during that time it was usually on the phone, or we'd meet at a restaurant. I thought it was sort of my responsibility as her old teacher not to act as though her situation was okay with me, or to get chummy with him."
"But he knew where you lived, right?"
"I'm sure he probably did." She smiled. "But I'm leaving, so it doesn't matter."
"Before you go, I'd like to borrow a spare key."
"Sure, but why?"
"If someone comes here to find you, I don't want their trip to be wasted."
27
Jane stood outside the wall of windows in front of the San Diego airport with the people smoking a last cigarette before their flights. She wore a wide sun hat and big sunglasses and held a lighted cigarette in her hand. Now and then she took some smoke into her mouth and blew it out. She watched Sharon until she was beyond the security barrier and walking down the concourse to board her plane. Then Jane turned her attention to the ticketing area long enough to be sure that none of the four people she had seen chasing Christine showed up at the last minute to board Sharon's flight. A minute after flight time, Jane threw away her cigarette and went inside to look at the television monitor to verify that Sharon's plane had taken off. Then she went to the parking lot and drove back to Sharon's house.
She was almost positive now that her intuition about how Christine had been abducted from Minneapolis was correct. The four people Richard Beale had hired had stalked her there. Probably they had put her in an enclosed vehicle of some kind—Jane imagined a windowless van—and driven across half the country to bring Christine to Richard Beale. But that must have been three weeks ago, and finding Christine—and maybe the baby, too, by now—was not going to be simple. The next step for Jane was to find out where Beale was now.
In the late afternoon Jane drove to the offices of the Beale Company in La Jolla and studied the building from the street. It was a four-story rectangle with windows that had been tinted to an almost opaque black, so the building looked like a shiny black box. The place held a special attraction for Jane. If Beale had anything he wanted to keep secret, she was more likely to be able to find a way to get at it in his office than at his house. She was particularly interested in a list of the pieces of property that the company owned. If Beale was holding Christine, it would have to be in a place he could control absolutely.
Most businesses had some sort of video surveillance system. There would also be at least a halfhearted security service at night, an armed patrol that drove by looking for broken windows and unexpected lights. But most office buildings were cleaned at night by some kind of janitorial service, so it would be important that Jane be ready before then.
A little before six, Jane drove her SUV north to the area near Sharon's house in Encinitas. Earlier she had seen some stores that she knew would have the items she needed, and would be open in the evening. She began at a giant Sears store. She went to the men's clothing section and picked up a pair of navy blue pants and a matching shirt, a baseball cap that was only a half-shade darker blue than the clothes, and a dark blue bandanna. Then she went to the hardware section. There among the power tools she found packages of disposable dust masks that fit over a person's nose and mouth to keep dust from entering the lungs, and in the paint department a package of very thin rubber gloves.
She waited at Sharon's house until it was night, changed into her Sears clothes, and then drove back to La Jolla. She parked down the street from the Beale Company building and settled in
to watch. At one A.M. she saw a white van pull into the parking lot beside the building. It was old, with some dents in the rear bumper, the sort that came from backing into posts in parking lots. The blue logo on the side of the van was a big outline of a hand, and the words said HELPING HAND JANITORIAL. Two young Hispanic men climbed down from the van, went around to the back, and opened the doors. They pulled two boards out of the back and leaned them on the bumper to make a ramp, then steered a big industrial vacuum cleaner down, then a big floor buffer, and locked the van.
She watched them go to the front door, unlock it, and go inside. Now that it was dark out, she could look through the dark glass and see the janitors working in lighted offices. When they went into a room they would turn on the light, and that single square on the side of the black building would become transparent. First one of the men went from room to room emptying wastebaskets into a large plastic trash can on wheels. After he had done that he would take a rag and a bottle of glass cleaner to the desks and the windows. Coming along behind him, the second man ran the vacuum cleaner on the carpets and turned off the light. The two worked quickly, and Jane could follow their progress easily from outside.
When the first man went outside to wheel the trash can to the Dumpster, he stuck a doorstop in the front door to keep it ajar so he could get back in. While he was out of sight, Jane got out of her SUV wearing her work uniform, baseball cap, and dust mask. She went to the front door and slipped inside. Surveillance cameras were almost always mounted high, so she kept her head low as she hurried down the hall.
The two janitors had finished with the now-darkened interiors of the offices, so she hurried to one on the first floor, went inside, and crawled under the desk to wait. She heard the elevator doors open and close a couple of times in the quiet building as the men moved from one floor to another. Some time later she heard them return with the electric buffer and polish the lobby.
When Jane heard the sounds of the men moving their equipment outside, she waited a few more minutes, then got up and cautiously walked down the hall. Their van was gone, and she was alone in the dimly lit building. She could explore freely. After looking at the signs on a few doors, she found one off the main lobby that said, RICHARD BEALE, PRESIDENT. She looked the other way and saw the glass wall of the atrium, and in front of it, the receptionist's desk where she had seen Christine in the photographs on the Internet.
She opened the door to Beale's office and stopped. There were no windows. The office was the right size—a bit bigger than the others—and it had the right sort of furniture: large leather couches, a long polished conference table, and a big glass-topped desk with very little on it except a computer screen and a keyboard and a telephone. But it seemed terribly odd to her that the office of the owner of a prosperous company would have no windows.
She set the thought aside for the moment because there were things she had to do. She pushed a chair to the spot directly below the dome that covered the surveillance camera, used the blade of her pocketknife to pry the dark plastic dome off, then stopped again in surprise. The video cable for the camera had been disconnected. It had been unscrewed. Jane replaced the dome, got down, and moved along the walls looking carefully at every shelf or fixture to be sure there wasn't a buttonhole camera hidden somewhere. She found nothing.
Apparently Richard Beale had disabled the security camera himself. Now she had a better idea of what had made him pick the darkest, most closed-in office in his own company. He probably made deals in here with people like the ones he had sent after Christine. And Christine had said he was very careful that he not be the one to sign certain papers or have his name on certain deals. It wouldn't make much sense to videotape himself doing things that were illegal.
She began a methodical search of the room. She went through the files in the cabinet, plucking out the papers that seemed useful. The computer and the printer were turned on, and the printer had a copier function, so she copied the lists of buildings currently for sale or rent, the property tax files showing property the company had paid taxes on. Jane was particularly interested in addresses where land was registered in a name other than Beale Company. She worked quickly, scanning one paper while another was copied, leaving files opened so she could return each sheet to its place.
She found the articles of incorporation of the Beale Company and its subsequent filings with the Department of Corporations. The corporate papers were over forty years old, and the owners and officers were listed as Andrew and Ruby Beale. Richard Beale had signed for the past few years as the president of the company, but he was not listed as an owner, or even a stockholder. There were only two shares of stock, one owned by Ruby Beale and the other by Andrew Beale.
There was a personnel file for Richard Beale, so she checked to verify that his address was the one Sharon had given her. His salary was "as negotiated," and his payroll record showed he made about two hundred thousand dollars a year. He lived in a house in Del Mar owned by the company and drove a company car, a black Porsche. There were no personnel files for Steve Demming, Ronnie Sebrot, Pete Tilton, Claudia Marshall, Sybil Landreau, or Carl McGinnis.
When Jane had copied the records she wanted, she readjusted her dust mask and hat so she would not be identifiable on the surveillance cameras in the lobby, turned off the lights, and hurried out to the SUV.
Jane drove back to Sharon's house after two A.M., and made a careful search of the grounds and the surrounding streets before she went in. She had chosen to stay at Sharon's because she was hoping to surprise one or more of Richard Beale's thugs as they watched Sharon's house, but so far, she had seen no sign of them. She arranged blankets over some pillows to make Sharon's bed look occupied, then took a spare quilt and lay on the floor in the hallway leading from the kitchen to the living room with her two guns beside her where she could reach them in the dark. From there she judged she would be able to hear if someone broke in looking for Sharon.
Jane drowsed, then awoke suddenly and looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was almost three A.M. She had just fallen into a pleasant dream about Carey, then felt a panicky sensation, a fear that she was losing him. She stood, went out the back door of Sharon's house, and got into her SUV. She drove to the plaza where the big Sears store was, and parked beside the pay telephone she had seen in the afternoon. She dialed the number of the house in Amherst, New York, and put in enough coins for three minutes.
"Hello?"
"Hi. I knew it was six there, and you'd be getting ready for work. I couldn't relax until I talked to you."
"That's nice. I think it's nice, anyway. Unless you were dreaming about lawyers. Were you?"
"No lawyers. And it is nice. Your ears should be burning. And don't be alarmed if lots of other places are burning, too."
"You don't happen to be anywhere near here, do you? I could meet you somewhere—pick up a bottle of champagne and an orchestra on the way."
"I'm not near, but I wish I were. I just felt kind of desperate to say something."
"What is it?"
"That I'm sorry if things seemed a little hollow when I left home. I love you completely, and I will until I die. And probably when my heart stops, there will still be a few seconds before I lose consciousness, and I'll try to remember as many of the days I had with you as I can before my mind goes dark."
"Jane, are you in danger now?"
"No. Not at all. I'm just taking care of some things here. I called because I was afraid you were feeling as though I didn't love you enough. Or maybe I was feeling that I hadn't said it enough or said it right, or acted the way I wanted to."
"I'm glad you called. But I wasn't doubting you. I've been worried about you since long before ... before the hospital benefit. But it was a normal family sort of worry. I knew you'd been having a hard time about the baby and everything, but I haven't found a way to be of much help."
Jane smiled. "I'm not your patient, Carey. You can't approach it that way. Just keep trying the other way. Somethi
ng still might happen."
"It's a deal."
"And if nothing happens, I want you to know it doesn't change anything between us. You're it, the one I want. I have to finish what I'm doing right now, but after that everything will be the same."
"I would like it if you weren't out there taking risks."
"Don't worry. I'll be home soon. We'll talk then."
"That sounds terminal. Are you getting ready to hang up?"
"Yes. I want to say 'I love you' before I go, but I've just said it so many times you'll think I'm an idiot."
"Then let me be the idiot," he said. "I love you. Call again if you can, but I'll understand if you can't. Just come home safe."
"I will." She hung up, then got into her SUV and drove back to Sharon's house. She went in through the back door, settled into her spot in the corridor between the kitchen and the living room, and slept.
In the morning she drove past the Beale Company office in La Jolla again and verified that there was a black Porsche parked in the space marked RESERVED FOR RICHARD BEALE. Then she drove on.
Richard Beale's address was a house on the beach in Del Mar. Jane had been to Del Mar a couple of times about eight years ago. The beach at Del Mar was one of the prettiest inhabited places in the country. It had broad, white sand beaches that rose only slightly as they stretched up from the surf, and then tall groves of tropical trees that formed a curtain between the beach and the coast highway. The incredible blue Pacific was so enormous that having a few rich people living along its edge wasn't enough of a blight to be noticeable. The beaches were almost empty on a weekday morning, and most of the houses were low, sprawling structures that didn't irritate the eye.
She drove by the racetrack and then along the coast highway looking at street markers and mailboxes until she found the right number. From the road she could see only a tall wooden gate, a hedge, and a closed garage door. She kept going along the road until she reached a mall built on several terraces set into a bluff across the road from the ocean. There were restaurants, a few upscale shops, and a bookstore. Jane parked her SUV on a side street above the mall where she could drive it out quickly, then went to a restaurant and had a simple breakfast while she watched the highway and the stores. It was not out of the question that she might see the two men and two women who had been searching for Christine. If Christine was being held at Richard Beale's house, then Beale would need to have someone to keep her there. Jane went into a shop and bought a tank top, a pair of running shorts, and some sneakers. She changed into them in the dressing room, then put her clothes in the SUV and went jogging.
