Runner

by Thomas Perry

  The beach access was a forty-foot gap in the trees where the asphalt of the road gave way to sand. Jane trotted across the wide, soft expanse of beach to the hard, wet margin where the long, slow swells hissed in. It was easier to run on the wet sand, and running along the surf gave her a chance to look at the area as she approached Richard Beale's property. The only person she passed was a platinum blond woman about fifty years old throwing a tennis ball into the surf for her German shorthair to retrieve. When Jane found Beale's house, she could see no signs of life on the ocean side of it, and there were no lights and no movement visible beyond the big picture windows. She could see no other windows open.

  Jane looked up and down the beach, but she saw no faces at any windows in nearby houses. The woman and her dog were moving off down the beach in the other direction, so Jane decided to take the chance. She jogged up on the soft sand until her angle hid her from the houses on either side, and stopped at the oceanfront entrance to the house.

  She could see the roof was bare, with no transmitter that would send a wireless signal to an alarm company, and when she peered in the windows she could still see no sign of anyone inside. She stepped around to the street side of the house, where there was a large yard with a swimming pool that had boulders and a waterfall. Attached to the house was a two-car garage. She tried the side door of the garage, found it unlocked, and stepped inside. The back wall had hooks on it to hold various tools. Jane selected a pair of longhandled hedge trimmers. She went back out, cut the telephone line where it came off the roof to the metal junction box on the side of the house, then returned to the garage and opened the main power switch at the circuit breaker box.

  Jane made no attempt to hide the damage she made in her entry. She had decided that it would be best for her to let Richard Beale worry about who had been here to visit him. She used a cordless electric drill that had been plugged into a charger on the workbench to drill out the woodwork beside the doorknob, and picked up a crowbar. She knew that alarm systems usually had batteries that would give them enough power to work if the electricity was cut, so she was prepared for some noise. She pushed the door open and stepped into the house.

  The frantic electronic beeping came from the speaker of the keyboard on the wall unit beside the front door, so she followed the sound and used her crowbar to pry the unit off the wall, disconnected the wires in the back, and restored the silence. She knew the system would be automatically dialing its internal modem to register the break-in, but the phone line was cut, so the call would never connect.

  Jane stepped farther into the house. As she moved from room to room, she formed a sense of the place. It was designed and furnished for parties. There was a bar, lots of stylish, uncomfortable furniture and paintings with bold, stark lines in colors matched to the color scheme of each room—splashes of bright reds and yellows near the main entrance, calming down to sky blue and white near the beach side.

  There was nothing homelike here. She stepped from room to room, searching for anything that would indicate that Christine had been living here, but there was nothing of Christine's. All the clothes in the closets were male. There were no toiletries of the sort that only women used. Jane looked farther into the house for hidden spaces. There was no locked door anywhere, and she paced a couple of interior rooms to be sure there wasn't any space between them that could be wide enough for a secret room.

  She opened a closed door on the upper hall and found herself in a bright white room full of new baby furniture, baby clothes, toys, and equipment, but no sign that any of it had ever been used. Most of it was still in its original packaging. The crib mattress was still in a thick plastic wrapper.

  Jane began another, more melancholy examination of the house. She searched for discoloration that might be an indication of the removal of blood from any of the floors, carpets, or furniture. She compulsively sighted along the walls and took down five paintings, trying to find a spot where blood might have hit a wall and trickled down behind a frame, or a spackle spot covering a hole where a bullet had entered the plaster.

  Then she stopped and simply looked. The thought she had been evading was in the front of her mind now—that Christine was dead. It was more than a remote possibility. It was likely. Richard Beale was apparently the sort of man who would hunt his ex-girlfriend down and force her back to him. There had always been the chance that what he wanted was not to reconcile, but to be sure she retained nothing that could threaten his future—the baby, certainly, and also her knowledge of the particulars of his business, her memory of things he had done that would get him into trouble if they were revealed.

  If he wanted her dead, he wouldn't necessarily have her killed in some distant city. The police there would try to identify her body and start trying to find out where she had lived and who she had worked for. But if he got Christine all the way back here, where he could take his time and control everything, he would be able to make her vanish. He had the whole Pacific Ocean at his back door.

  Jane walked out the kitchen door to the garage, and then out the side door to the yard and back down to the beach. She reached the hard, wet sand at the edge, and began to jog. There were two young women in bathing suits a hundred yards down the beach. They had spread blankets on the sand and now they chatted while their two toddlers were busy digging with plastic shovels. As Jane passed, they diverted little of their attention from their children to notice her. It occurred to Jane that in a year or so, a young mother and child on the beach could be Christine and her baby, if they were alive.

  For fifteen years, Jane had been telling her runners, "I'm not interested in helping you get revenge. If that's what you want, then go get it. But if you want to run, I'll teach you." But this time was going to be different. If Richard Beale had hunted Christine down, brought her and her baby back here and killed them, Jane would make sure he died, too.

  28

  As Jane drove along the coast highway and up over the hill to the freeway, she reminded herself that she had still found nothing that would prove Beale had caught Christine. It was still possible that something else had happened. Christine had spoken with Sharon on the telephone. Maybe she had called another friend, someone her own age. Christine might very well have gone to visit the friend and still be there. The fact that Christine's car was missing didn't necessarily mean the four kidnappers had taken it away from her. She could just as easily have driven it somewhere and still be using it.

  Jane dialed the phone number of Christine's apartment in Minneapolis again and let it ring until the voice mail came on. Then she hung up, called Express Jet, and booked a flight to Santa Barbara, then called a car rental agency. In four hours she was on the plane in a chestnut-colored wig, feeling glad that she wouldn't have to wear it for a long flight.

  When she reached Santa Barbara, she picked up a white Chrysler 300 at the rental agency and drove it northward on Highway 101.

  She checked into a hotel in Lompoc before she called the prison. She requested permission for Delia Monahan to visit Robert Monahan again on Saturday. When she called back to find out whether the visit had been approved, the official she was transferred to said she could come again at the same time as before.

  She left for the prison an hour earlier than she had last time, stopped at various spots along the route, and studied every vehicle she saw, looking for any sign that Beale's crew was watching the road. When she reached the parking lot, she drove up and down the aisles, looking for the dark-haired woman who had followed her on the last trip. Then Jane drove another circuit looking for anyone at all who was waiting in a car, anything on a dashboard that could be a camera, or any other sign that the lot was under surveillance. She parked and made her way to the prison entrance to begin the long process of getting admitted to the visiting room.

  The wait was not as long this time, possibly because she had shown up earlier than her appointment, or possibly because she had been here before and not caused any uneasiness among the guards. When the
officer called Delia Monahan, she stood and followed him to the visiting room.

  She could see the anxious look on Robert Monahan's face, and realized what it was. He was sitting on his side of the long counter expecting to hear that his new grandchild had been born. He stood up and held out his arms.

  Jane gave him a brief hug to reassure the Visiting Room Officer that she was Delia, and that she had nothing in her hands that she was trying to slip to Monahan. They sat down and she said, "How have you been?"

  "Not so hot, but it hasn't got anything to do with my daughter. Tell me about Chris and the baby."

  Jane sighed. "You've got to stay calm and pretend that what I'm going to say isn't shocking. Can you?"

  Monahan nodded.

  "I went to stay with Christine a few days ago, and when I got to the apartment where I had left her, she wasn't there. Her car was gone and there were no signs of a struggle, but she'd been gone for a long time."

  "How long?"

  "The only one who had expected to see her was her doctor, and she hasn't been in for her checkups in a month. I think she may have been gone about three weeks."

  "You said her car was gone. Could she have just driven it somewhere?"

  Jane placed her hand on his forearm and looked into his eyes. "Believe me, I want that to be what happened. I just don't think it is."

  "Why not? How can you know?"

  "Last time I came to see you, a woman followed me away from the prison and up the road. I managed to lose her on the way through Lompoc, but each of us got a good close look at the other. I'm pretty sure she's one of the six people that Richard Beale hired to find Christine. There was no other reason for anyone to know who I was or that I was coming here. And there's certainly no other reason for anyone to follow me, except to find Christine."

  Robert Monahan frowned. "I don't understand what you're saying."

  "The woman wasn't here this morning when I got here, and neither were any of the others. Three months ago she was here, but today there's nobody here waiting for Christine or me to show up."

  "Isn't that a good thing?"

  "The only reason I can think of that they aren't here now is that they've already found her."

  "Maybe you're wrong. Maybe they've just decided they've done all they could do here, so they're looking somewhere else. They've been here and talked to me, and maybe that persuaded them that coming here was a lost cause."

  "Who talked to you?"

  "Richard Beale's father. His name is Andy."

  "When?"

  "Not too long after you were here. He made a special request to the warden's office to be allowed in. They asked me if I would be willing to see him, and I figured, why not?"

  "What did he tell you?"

  "A lot. That Richard missed her and wanted to marry her. He said Richard had a ring with a three-carat diamond and all that. He wanted me to tell Christine I thought she should go back."

  "You haven't had any chance to tell her that, have you?"

  "No," he said. "I made it pretty clear that if she's hiding, I didn't expect that she would be visiting me here any time soon. Maybe that was all it was. Maybe they waited for a month or so to be sure I was telling the truth, then went away and stayed away."

  "I hope you're right," said Jane. "I hope they decided the whole enterprise was futile or too dangerous for them. After all, this place is filled with law-enforcement people, and the city cops are probably ready for trouble, too. Maybe they thought that even if they saw her they wouldn't be able to kidnap her here."

  Robert Monahan leaned forward to study her. "Do you think my daughter is dead?"

  "I hope she isn't," said Jane. "I think the people Richard Beale hired were supposed to bring her back to San Diego. I think that Beale wanted her—and the baby, if it was born by then—brought to him. I don't know anything about him beyond that. I know that Christine got lonely at one point. She made at least one phone call to a woman she knew in San Diego after I told her to stop communicating with anyone from the past. It's possible that the people Beale hired to find her were monitoring some of Christine's old friends and picked something up, or she left a message and they broke in and replayed it, or got the passwords and were routinely calling in to hear the messages. That's the kind of thing that professional chasers do—cops, and private detectives, too, if they think they can get away with it."

  "You're telling me you think she made some little mistake like that? Some slipup and it killed her?" He knew there was no way for her to answer, so he looked down and put his head in his hands. "Jesus."

  Jane said, "Tell me about Andy Beale."

  "He's about sixty. He's big, and he looks as though he did some physical work in his time. Kind of tough-looking, but well dressed. When he talks he watches you for a reaction, and I get the impression that he's prepared to say whatever will give him the best one. He told me the things he knew would make me likely to want to please him—that he and his son had Chris's best interests at heart and that all Richard wanted was a chance to be a loving husband to her. But if he thought it would be more useful to say Richard was a kangaroo he would have said that instead."

  "What did you tell him about Christine?"

  "Nothing he didn't know already. That she didn't want to go back with Richard and that she wasn't likely to come here, either. You hadn't told me anything else."

  "Right." She sat still for a moment, trying to decide how to say the next part. "It's possible that when I leave here I'm going to find the four of them waiting outside to follow me to Christine. If so, I'll be very happy and I'll take them on quite a trip. But I honestly don't have much hope that's what's going to happen."

  "I understand," he said.

  "When I find out why Christine wasn't where I expected and what happened after that, I'll try to get word to you." She stood.

  "Be careful," he said.

  "Don't worry. I'll try very hard not to put her in danger."

  "Or you," he said. "If anything happened to you, I wouldn't know where to start looking. All I've got is the address and number of your P.O. box in my memory."

  She gave Robert Monahan a hug, then caught the Visiting Room Officer's eye and followed him to the door.

  When Jane was outside the building, she walked slowly, scanning the lot. It was a hot, late-summer morning, and the sunlight glinted from every shiny surface of every car, and the distant parts of the lot melted into mirage lakes wavering in the glare. There was not a head in any car window to pay attention to her. As she approached her rental car, she was already sure that nobody was waiting. Wherever Christine was, Richard Beale was no longer curious about her.

  29

  Andy Beale's twenty-acre estate in Rancho Santa Fe was in the tax rolls, but not in the lists of holdings that were being offered for sale, rental, or lease. It stood out in the tax payments list, not only because it was especially big and expensive, but because no notation indicated what it was. At first Jane thought it must be a parcel that was being subdivided. She had seen lots of these tracts in California—groups of little mansions, forty or fifty homes that looked like miniature Tuscan villas. Every street was a cul-de-sac, and the houses were all built from the same three or four sets of plans, so there was an illusion of variation. But then she happened to see an internal memo about a bid on a building site. It directed that a copy be sent to Andrew Beale at the Rancho Santa Fe address. It looked to her as though it must be company property, held ostensibly as an investment, but really an expensive residence for the company's owner.

  She looked at road maps to determine exactly where the house was, and then after lunch she drove out to see it. The landscapes of California were oddly familiar, like places in dreams. Every film, every television series, every commercial was filmed in some part of Southern California. People from the east like Jane came for the first time and stepped into places that had already been established in their memories. Rancho Santa Fe looked like landscapes in old movies. The road from the freeway bega
n on a two-lane new black asphalt trail that ran among stunted live oaks and native brush. She had already learned that California roads like this always led to places where rich people lived—Malibu, Montecito, Hope Ranch, Rancho Santa Fe. It took millions to have a big house anywhere in Southern California, but to keep broad margins of land untouched around the whole community required people with great fortunes who were determined to maintain their exclusivity and quiet.

  She began to see large rectangles of grassy land with the high white wooden rail fences that were the sure sign of horses, and then the horses themselves, smooth chestnut and brown bodies far off in grassy paddocks. It was hard to see any of the houses. In most cases only the mouths of the long driveways that led to them were visible—really no more than a gap in the trees with an iron gate across it, or a place where a long, unchanging wall suddenly fell back a few feet.

  When Jane came upon the central square of the community, it was a mild surprise. There was a rustic post office, a brick structure that might be another public building, a couple of restaurants of the sort that were too good to post their names or even concede that they were restaurants. They simply looked like elegant residences built with broad entrances and tables in their gardens. Jane followed her map away from the square and up a long road with tall hedges on the left side and more oak trees and dry grass on the right.