Dance for the Dead jw-2

by Thomas Perry

  "So they hunt him."

  "Yeah. The rest of it was just about the head guy."

  "What about him?"

  "How he did all of it. He went to work in the L.A. office a few years ago and set all this up. He was born off in the woods someplace way north of here, and he's a tracker. He thinks like a hound. Once he's got the scent, he never gives up. Farrell says he used to go after killers all by himself just for the kick it gave him. He gets a rush out of it, like a hunter."

  "When?"

  "When what?"

  "When did he go after killers?"

  "Before. When he was a cop."

  Jane felt increasingly tense. "What's his name?"

  "Bearclaw."

  It wasn't exactly a surprise, but she felt a sensation like an electric shock. "Barraclough?"

  "B-A-R-R-A-something. He's - "

  "I've heard of him," Jane interrupted. She tried to clear her mind of the thoughts that were crowding in. She could almost see Danny Mittgang's face eight or nine years ago when she had asked him why he was running. He had not said the Los Angeles police wanted him as a material witness; what came out of Danny's mouth was "Barraclough." He had actually begun to sweat and gulp air. The name was already so familiar in certain circles that he had expected her to know it.

  She had heard it many times after that, and each time there was something odd about the story. A fugitive's friends who had refused to betray him the first time they were questioned talked to Barraclough. A middle-aged man who had committed a white-collar crime would uncharacteristically forget there was no evidence against him and burst out at Barraclough with guns blazing. Barraclough would use information that could have come only from a wiretap to find a suspect, but no wiretap evidence would be introduced at the trial. She had filed the name with a few others, policemen in various parts of the country who were willing to do just about anything to catch a suspect. But the difference between Barraclough and the others was that when his name was mentioned, the person who said it was always afraid.

  Jane tried to concentrate. She was not likely to get a second interview with this young man. "How did you get out of the job?"

  "No problem. I told Farrell I didn't want in."

  "Why not?"

  "I didn't like him."

  "It was the job you didn't like, wasn't it? The first one he wanted you to do?"

  The young man shrugged. "Ellery said you might be interested in the picture they gave me, and I just told you I got no job."

  Jane held out her hand. In the palm were two fresh green bills that had been rolled into her fingers since she'd come out of the shadows to meet him. They unrolled enough so that he could see the hundreds in the corners.

  He reached inside his jacket and pulled a photograph out of his breast pocket. He handed it to her and then gently plucked the two bills off her palm.

  Jane held the picture up, trying to catch the dim glow of the distant street lamp. She didn't want to wait to know whether it was one of the Christmas snapshots the Deckers had mailed to Grandma or one of the family mementos the killers had taken from the Washington house. She caught a flash of blond hair, and held it higher to be sure. It wasn't a picture of Timmy at all: it was Mary Perkins.

  17

  Mary Perkins had spent most of her month in Ann Arbor learning about Donna Kester. She had discovered that Donna was not comfortable in the apartment that Jane Whitefield had helped her to rent. It was not Jane Whitefield's fault, although she was tempted to sweep up whatever annoying particles of blame were lying around and heap them on her. Mary had assumed that Donna Kester was going to be someone who would like the long, clean lines of the modern apartment complex. It reminded Mary of the hotels where she had stayed for most of her adult life.

  But as the winter came on, the building seemed hastily built and drafty, as though the carpenters had left something undone that she couldn't see. The exercise room that the tenants shared was a big box with a glass wall where women a lot younger than Mary went to display the results of many earlier visits to young men who seemed to be too intent on lifting large pieces of iron to notice what was being offered. The pool in the courtyard promised more of the same in the distant summer without the chance to hide the mileage under a good pair of tights. And the dirty snow that had drifted over its plastic cover began to contribute to her feeling that summer wasn't something that was still to come.

  As Donna Kester explained her position to herself, the place wasn't congenial. She moved closer to the university and rented the top floor of a big house that had been built in the 1920s. It was the sort of house where she had grown up in Memphis, with a lot of time-darkened wood in places where they didn't put wood anymore, and a layer of thick carpet that covered the stairway and muffled the creak and was much cleaner at the edges than at the center.

  Her apartment had a small, neat little kitchen and a bedroom with a brass bed in it that wasn't a reproduction of anything, but wasn't good enough to be an antique. The closet was small, but it was big enough for the sort of wardrobe that Donna Kester was likely to acquire. The living room had a bad couch and a good easy chair that was aimed as though by a surveyor directly at a twenty-year-old RCA television set that picked up only two channels she had trouble telling apart. But the two channels had forecasters who did a fair job of predicting the weather, and this was about all she required of them for the moment because it let her know what to wear while she was out looking for a job.

  Mary began to feel more comfortable as Donna Kester soon after she moved into the old apartment. She had no trouble suppressing the landlords' curiosity with a vague reference to a divorce. In the future, whenever they had a question in their minds about her lack of a work history and shallow credit record, she could be too sensitive to talk about it. They could chew on the divorce and come up with plausible answers until they found one that satisfied them. It sometimes seemed that Donna Kester knew everything about people that Mary Perkins knew, only it hadn't cost her as much.

  Donna walked into the hallway, threaded her new scarf into the sleeve of her big goose-down coat, stuffed her new gloves into the pockets, and hoisted the coat onto the peg. She sat down on the steps to take off her boots, and felt the distressing sensation of having the melted snow from her last trip soak through the seat of her pants. She stood up quickly, set the boots on the mat, and carefully made her way up the stairs in her socks. She felt unfairly punished. She thought she had learned about tracking snow on the steps early enough. The carpet would have dried by now if there had been heating ducts near the entrance at the foot of the stairs.

  If she owned this place, she would damned well have a contractor in by tomorrow noon. She would put a big old brass register right by the door where a person could get hugged by that breath of hot air as soon as she made it inside, and then leave her coat and boots in front of it to get toasted before she went out again. She had a brief fantasy about buying the house from the Monahans and getting the contractor on the phone before the ink on the deed was dry.

  She reached into her purse and grasped her key. That made her feel better. It was the big old-fashioned kind that was a shaft of steel four inches long with an oval ring on one end and the teeth on the other. It looked like the key to a castle and it made her feel safe. She had some justification for the feeling. The lock set into the thick, solid door looked about the size of a deck of cards, with big steel tumblers and springs that snapped like a trap when she locked it, and it was easy to see that it had been in there for a long time. If there had ever been a break-in they would have replaced it.

  She reached the top, put her hand on the yellowed porcelain doorknob, pushed in her key, and felt the door swing open. The lights were on. She turned and tried to step back down the stairs as quickly and quietly as she could, but she knew she was making too much noise - already had made too much noise just coming in and climbing the stairs - so she began to take the steps by leaning on the railing and jumping as many as she could to land with a th
ump.

  She burned with a hatred for her stupidity. When she had felt the cold wet spot on the stairs she should have known someone else had been here. It wasn't as though it were a faint clue; it was a warning sign practically branded on her ass. She regretted all of it: leaving the sprawling, noisy, busy apartment complex for this old house where they didn't even have to think hard about how to get her alone because she was always alone; letting herself rent a second apartment at all, because showing the false documents twice raised the risk by exactly one hundred percent; trusting like a child to big locks and keys - no, hiding the way a child did, not by concealing herself but by covering her own eyes with her hands.

  As she reached the bottom and realized with a pang that common sense required that she race through the door into the snow without stopping for her boots, the voice touched her gently.

  "It's me," said Jane Whitefield. "Don't run. It's only me."

  Mary stopped with her face to the door. She turned and looked up. She could see the silhouette of the tall, slim woman in front of the dimly lighted doorway at the top of the stairs. The shape was dark, a deeper shadow, and for a second a little of the fear came back into her chest like a paralysis in her lungs. Then the woman at the top of the stairs swung Mary's door open and said in the same quiet voice, "Sorry to startle you."

  Mary climbed back up her stairs slowly and deliberately because she wanted to let her heart stop pounding. The way Jane had said it was an invitation to join a conspiracy. People who were startled jumped half an inch and said, "Oh." They didn't vault down twenty-foot staircases and dash into the snow in wet socks. That was what people did who were terrified, running for their lives. We'll let your cowardice pass without comment, and we'll call it something else. That was what Jane was saying. No, it was even worse than that. She knew it wasn't merely cowardice. It was the only sane response for a woman who was guilty of so much that any surprise visitor was probably there because he wanted to put her in a bag. That was what Jane was passing without comment.

  Mary reached the top of the stairs and stepped into her living room. She looked around for Jane but couldn't see or hear her, which made her remember the strangeness about the woman that had always irritated her. It was that erect quietness that made other people feel as though they talked too much without getting anything in return, like they were emptying the contents of their brains into a deep, dark hole, where it wasn't deemed enough to amount to much. She drifted around like she was the queen of the swans, and it was okay with her if anybody with her suspected she thought they were dumb, short, and pasty-faced and their voices were too loud.

  Mary heard the sound of the teakettle steaming in the kitchen; then it stopped, so that was where Jane must be. She felt tension stiffen the back of her neck and shoulders.

  This was her place, and there was some primal insult in having another woman walk in and go through her cupboards. She hated owing this woman so much that she had to endure it.

  Mary moved toward her little kitchen just as Jane came out with the tea tray, already talking. "I'm really sorry I had to come in like this. It would make me angry if anyone did it to me, but it seemed best. In the first place, I didn't know you well enough to be able to predict whether you were likely to have gotten your hands on a gun. You've had plenty of time to do it."

  Mary felt the words dissolve what remained of her confidence like a sugar cube in a rainstorm. She had been here a month, and it had never occurred to her to obtain the most obvious way of protecting herself. The decision she would have made was by no means certain, but that didn't help; it made her even more frightened, because she had not given it even enough thought to reject it.

  But Jane was going on. and Mary hadn't been listening. "... didn't want to get my head blown off, and I figured if your landlord heard a woman coming up the steps he would assume it was you. I've been very careful not to cause trouble by coming here. Nobody followed me and nobody had a chance to see me outside waiting. I saw you coming up the sidewalk, so I made tea." She held out a cup so Mary could take it.

  Mary sniffed it and said, "It's different."

  "I picked it up in L.A." said Jane. "It's mixed with blackberry leaves. I've got a weakness for nonsense like that."

  Mary sipped. At least this woman had not come in and put her hands into the cupboards looking for things. The teakettle and the water were in plain sight. She resisted the feeling. Whatever this woman wanted, she was not going to get it by dropping a teabag into a cup of water. She smiled. "Me too."

  Mary's smile was like a cat purring while it rubbed its fur against a person's leg. Jane could see that the smile had not just been practiced in front of a mirror. It had about it the cat's ease and grace that could only have come from bringing it out and using it to get what the cat needed. She looked around. "I like your apartment," she said.

  Mary longed for her to say something insincere about the furniture.

  "You got everything right," said Jane. "It would be pretty hard for somebody to get all the way up that stairway if you really wanted to stop him. The building looks like a single-family house from the outside, so nobody would look for a stranger here. That's the important thing. Not what you'll do if they find you, but being where they won't look."

  "How did you find me? Or were you here all the time watching me?"

  "Why would I do that?"

  "I don't know. Maybe to see what I did." Mary realized that she had not said anything. She resolved not to make this mistake again. "To see if I was good enough at it to have a chance."

  Jane said, "No, I don't play games."

  "Then you changed your mind about me." Without any reason at all, Mary thought.

  "No again," said Jane. "I expected you to be good at it."

  Mary was tired. She had spent the day trying to get personnel managers to give her a competitive test of business skills when all they wanted was references, then to give her the benefit of the doubt based on her ability to speak knowledgeably, and the promise that references could be obtained, and finally just to give her a break because she was pleasant, well-groomed, and eager. Now she was sitting in a pair of pants with a wet seat. "Let me try to be more direct," she said. "You helped me, and I thank you for that. Then you walked out on me. Rather mysteriously, I might add. Now you're back. You tell me I played a good game of hide-and-seek, but here you are. You seem to have had no trouble finding me, or opening the lock to my door to get in and make yourself a cup of tea. I've never had any difficulty believing you're better at this than I am, but now I'm not just awed, I'm scared to death. So what do you want?"

  Jane put down her tea. "You shouldn't be scared to death. I found you because I knew where to look. If you had been stupid, you would have left Ann Arbor, put yourself in the airports and hotel lobbies again, and inevitably found your way to one of the places where they're looking. I knew you weren't stupid, so I was pretty sure you must still be in this town. So what would you be doing? If you had wanted to give up on life you would have stayed put and done nothing. A person can sit in the right locked room forever without getting found if she has enough to pay the rent. I figured you would be too lively to go that way, so I tried the job route."

  "What's the job route?" Mary asked.

  "I knew you had the sense to figure out that the more you do with a fake identity, the better it gets because after a while it's not exactly fake anymore. You're not the only woman in town with records that only go back a few years. Pretty soon it will take a lot of digging to detect whether you're entirely rebuilt or just went through the usual changes - a couple of marriages that brought new names, a couple of moves from one state to another, a career change or two. Having eliminated the possibility that you had left or gone into a coma, I knew you would be applying for jobs. It's the best way to start a new life."

  "That was enough?" asked Mary.

  "The biggest and safest employer in Ann Arbor is the university. I called the personnel office and said I was a member of a faculty c
ommittee trying to hire someone to do the accounting and clerical work for a big research grant in the medical school."

  "Why that? Why not something else?"

  "Faculty members aren't hired by the university personnel office. They're hired by the faculty, so there was very little chance she would look for a personnel file on me and not find it. Medical schools are semi-autonomous, so I could play an insider without knowing anything about her operation. I asked her to send me copies of applications with a bookkeeping background, since I figured that would be your strength. I asked how long it would take to bring them to my office. She said a day or two, so I offered to come over and pick them out myself. That way I didn't need an office."

  "You got this address off my application. God, it's easy."

  "Not that easy," said Jane. "Nobody knows what I knew - your new name, the city, and where you'd have to apply for work if you wanted any." She stared at Mary Perkins over the rim of her teacup. "Not even Barraclough."

  Mary felt her spine stiffen. She considered her options. She could pretend the name had made no impression on her, and later find a chance to slip away quietly. She could create some kind of disturbance - throw the cup at Jane and run. But even if she got out the door, the only way of taking the next step was to fall back on the name and the credit that Jane had given her. She wasn't ready. She should have been ready. "How do you know that name? I never told you."

  "Why didn't you?" asked Jane. "You told me you didn't know who was looking for you."

  Mary Perkins's mind stumbled, held back from the conclusion it was about to reach. That was right. She had come to Jane Whitefield, and Jane Whitefield kept nagging her about who it was. She hadn't known. She couldn't have been working for Barraclough. At least a month ago she couldn't. "I wanted you to help me," said Mary. "I only provide the arguments for what I want. You have to supply your own arguments against."