Vanishing Act

by Thomas Perry

  "I’m sorry," she said. "But that’s the thing that’s worrying me. I know it’s probably silly, but ... Well, thanks for trying."

  She headed for the door, but Dave couldn’t bear it. "Wait," he said. She turned and looked at him. Her shamefaced expression wasn’t forced. She hated putting this nice man through hell for nothing.

  He said, "Maybe we can dig him up. He wouldn’t have driven across the country just to sell me a car. He’s got to be staying around here."

  "But how could I find him?"

  "Let me make a few calls. If he’s looking for a car, there aren’t that many places to look. Give me your phone number and I’ll call you if I have any luck."

  She said, "I’m at the Holiday Inn down the road. My name is Janet Foley."

  He grinned. "But you’ve already checked in, right? You’re not going to disappear like he did?"

  "No," she said. "Room two forty-three."

  She had lunch in a small restaurant on the way back to the hotel, then walked back to her room. The telephone was ringing when she opened the door.

  "Janet?" he said. "It’s Dave Rabel. It’s pretty much what I was trying to tell you. John Young bought a used Ford Bronco up at Taylor’s Used Cars in Lake Placid. He must have decided he needed a big, roomy car."

  "Did they have his address?"

  "I got his hotel from them, but he checked out three days ago."

  "I give up," said Jane.

  "You mean you’ll buy the car?"

  "No," said Jane. "I mean I can’t. I appreciate your trying so hard, but I’ll just have to wait until I see a car I’m sure about."

  He sighed. "You’re passing up the best used-car deal in the north country." He waited for her answer and nothing came, so he decided to end it on a friendly note. "But I guess you get hurt less by being too careful than not careful enough."

  ’’Thanks,’’ she said. "I knew you’d understand," and hung up. She said aloud, "Where were you when I met John Felker, Dave?"

  She kept her key but picked up the suitcase she hadn’t unpacked, went downstairs, and then drove to Lake Placid. She parked the car and began to walk from store to store in the small downtown section. She knew exactly what clothes he had because she had bought them. His suit and sportcoat would be useless here, because they would make him stand out. He had a couple of pairs of jeans and some shirts, but he would need a warm jacket for spring in the Adirondacks. James Michael Martin would not have bought one on the way here. He would have waited so he could choose something that local people were wearing, and buy it where they had bought theirs.

  At the first store, Jane showed the young man at the cash register the picture of Felker she had taken. The clerk was in his thirties, wearing shorts like the ones she could see on the rack near the door and a T-shirt that said LAKE PLACID. He barely glanced at the picture, so she had to force out a few tears. "He’s my boyfriend and we had a fight and ..." The clerk was alarmed enough to reassure her. "No. Honest. I’d remember. He hasn’t been in here."

  At the second store an older woman said, "Are you a policewoman?" When Jane tried the tears, the woman seemed to harden. "I don’t think chasing a man around is any basis for a relationship. If I had seen him, I’d be doing you a favor to keep it to myself." Jane could tell that she hadn’t.

  The part about the policewoman gave her an idea. She went back to the car to dig out the prison file. At the third store, she showed the mug shots. "Have you seen this man?" The clerk looked closely, and said, "No, ma’am," very quickly.

  The fifth establishment was a big sporting-goods store. As soon as she produced the picture, she knew she had crossed his trail. The girl at the cash register looked as though she was in high school, and at the sight of the mug shots she turned pale. "What did he do?"

  Jane pressed her. "Have you seen him?"

  "Well, yes. He bought some things. About three, four days ago."

  The manager was thin and alert, not many years older than the girl at the register. He had been labeling stock in the back of the store when he realized something out of the ordinary was happening. He hurried to the front. "Darlene," he said officiously. "I’ll handle this." But when he saw the picture, he looked worse than the girl had. "Oh yeah. What did he do?"

  Jane was stern. "Did he buy anything?"

  "Yes," said the manager. "Lots of things."

  Jane said, "He would have paid cash. Large denominations, probably hundreds."

  "He did," said the manager. Jane could tell that his mind was running quickly through the list of crimes that hundred-dollar bills proved without a doubt.

  "Do you, by any chance, have any of the money on hand?"

  "No," he said helplessly. "It went to the bank."

  "What bank?"

  "Winslow Federal." His mind tripped over the conclusion she had placed in front of him. "Is it counterfeit?"

  "If it is, we’ll let you know." She hurried to bury the "we" in the middle of the conversation. "What did he buy?"

  "Oh, God," he said. "You confiscate it, don’t you? If it’s not real you just take it."

  Jane felt sorry for the man; he seemed to be sure he was going to have it taken out of his pay for the next six months. "If you took it to the bank, it’s not your problem anymore," she said gently. "It’s like a hot potato. Nobody gets burned except the one who’s holding it." This seemed to make him feel better. When she could see the blood rising back into his face, she said, "Now, I’ll need a copy of the receipt for what he bought."

  "Sure," said the manager, who, looking about fifteen years old now, ran to the back of the store. He returned with a carbon copy of the receipt. Jane took it and slipped it into her file without looking at it. She said, "Now, is there anything he said or did that would help us find him?"

  "His car," said the manager. "I helped him carry all this stuff out. It was black. Big—"

  "A Ford Bronco?" she asked.

  "Yes!" he said, looking astounded. "Big wheels."

  "Do you remember any of the license number?"

  He looked ashamed. "No. I’m sorry. I didn’t think—"

  Jane decided it was time to get out. "I didn’t expect you to," she said kindly. "You’ve both been a big help. Thank you very much." She was already at the door by the time she finished the sentence.

  When Jane was back in her car, she took out the receipt and studied it. As she read it, her mind was tracking him: a pair of hiking boots, a sleeping bag, a tent, a fishing rod and reel, lures, a hatchet, a down-filled nylon jacket, a compass. He wasn’t going to a hotel in Saranac or Lake Placid. He was on his way into the mountains.

  24

  Martin was on his way into the back country, into the vast, empty spaces. The Adirondacks were enormous: almost eleven thousand square miles, some of it public park land, some private property, and dozens of towns. In that space, there were only eleven hundred miles of highways. Once he was off the paved roads, he could be anywhere in the six million acres that the federal government had decreed in 1894 would be "forever wild." She studied the map she had picked up at the hotel gift shop.

  He had a fresh car with New York plates on it. He wouldn’t drive any farther east into Vermont or north into Canada over the St. Lawrence River, where he would be a foreigner again. He certainly wasn’t going south, where the country flattened out and the population centers began, and he wasn’t staying in the eastern part of the mountains, where most of the millions of visitors would start arriving as soon as the weather warmed up a little. He would backtrack now, go west on Route 3, the way he had come in, and back through Saranac toward Tupper Lake. From there he could go southwest for eighty miles without ever being closer to a settlement than twenty miles. Looking at the map, she was almost certain of it.

  Before she left Lake Placid, she drove to Taylor Ford and spent ten minutes looking at a new Bronco. She paid very close attention to the oversize tires. Then she drove back along Route 3 toward Tupper Lake. There she spent a few hours wandering from one store
to another, as she had in Lake Placid. This time she used the photograph she had taken of him instead of the mug shots. He had bought lots of groceries at Winwood’s Grocery Store, but the girl at the checkout counter didn’t remember much about them except that they were the sort of things men bought. Jane wasn’t sure what this meant until she had watched a few men come into the store. There were a lot of preserved foods, not many fresh vegetables or much perishable meat. They were provisions for people who didn’t want to come back to town for a long time.

  It was nearly dark when she learned about the canoe. She walked into a boating store that called itself a marina, showed the picture, and the man at the counter recognized him instantly. Martin had been very particular about the canoe. It was fourteen feet long, built to be light "the way the Indians made ’em," with a very shallow draft. He had insisted on lifting the canoe and carrying it around in the parking lot before he would pay for it. That, the man told her, had been a sight, because it had been more canoe than he personally would have been happy carrying any distance on his head, but this guy could handle it and hold a horse under his left arm at the same time. He had set it up on the roof of the Bronco, strapped it down, and then paid cash.

  Jane spent the rest of the day selecting her own provisions without returning to any of the stores she had visited. She bought her own canoe at a fancy outdoors-man’s store in Saranac Lake. It was only eight feet long and weighed forty pounds. She bought an axe, a survival knife with fishing gear in the hollow handle, and a backpack at a hardware store in Wawbeek. She bought the rifle in Veterans Camp. When this was done, she had reached her weight limit. There was no way to carry a sleeping bag or tent, so she picked up a light nylon tarp. That afternoon when she went back to her room in Saranac Lake, she opened the prison file again.

  She read through the file searching for any piece of information that might help. She studied his medical records closely. There were no allergies, no old injuries that had left him with a weakness, no medicines he had to take, no deficiencies in his vision or hearing that would give her an edge. Ron the gravedigger had said something about his having killed another prisoner in Marion, but if it was true, there was nothing in his record about the fruitless investigation that must have followed, so she had no indication of how he had chosen to do it.

  She turned to the report of his final arrest. He had been working when they had spotted him in the surveillance of Jerry Cappadocia, so maybe the report would give her a sense of how he behaved when he was planning to kill somebody. The place of the surveillance was 9949 Madison Street. He had been picked up outside a building called Dennaway’s. What was that? It sounded like a bar, or maybe a restaurant. She picked up the telephone and called long-distance information, then dialed the number they gave her.

  "Dennaway’s," said a female voice.

  "Hello," said Jane, forcing her voice into the cheerful, businesslike tone she had learned years before when she worked as a skip-tracer. "I’m calling from the Better Business Bureau, and I find we have a blank in our descriptive listing for Dennaway’s. Can you help?"

  The woman hesitated. "Well, we have a little of everything, from Versace to Donna Karan."

  It was a women’s clothing store. Martin had been planning to kill Jerry Cappadocia at a women’s clothing store. "I’m just drawing from memory here," said Jane, "but didn’t you have a men’s department at one time?"

  "No, we’ve always been exclusively a ladies’ couturier."

  Jerry Cappadocia must have been shopping for the girl, buying her presents. What was her name? Lenore Sanders. "I’ll make sure that we get it right. Thank you for your help."

  "It’s a pleasure," crooned the woman. "Is there anything else I can tell you?"

  Jane decided there was no reason not to push it as far as she could. Any bit of information she could change from a speculation into a fact was worth having. She made her voice go soft and confidential. ’’Well, if you’re not too busy, maybe we can clear this up right now. Do you have a regular customer named Lenore Sanders?" Unless Jerry Cappadocia was stupid, he would have tried to buy Lenore the clothes she might have chosen. He would go to the stores where she shopped.

  "Let me look in the computer," said the woman. Jane didn’t feel hopeful. Five years was a long time. But after some audible clicking of keys and a pause, the woman said, "Oh, here she is. But I can’t imagine why she’d be writing to the Better Business Bureau about us. She hasn’t bought anything here lately."

  "Oh?" said Jane with a hint of suspicion. "I can’t imagine that it isn’t the same person. It’s such a distinctive name. Do you have an address for her?"

  "Oh," said the woman triumphantly. "I see the reason. She lives in St. Louis now. Lenore Sanders Cotton. Mrs. Robert Cotton, 5353 Dibbleton Way in St. Louis."

  "That’s the one," said Jane. "But you say she hasn’t bought anything lately?"

  "Not in almost a year. I guess she must stop in whenever she’s in town."

  "Yes," said Jane. "That’s got to be right. She said she mailed something back to you that was damaged, and it wasn’t credited. What is your return policy?"

  The woman sighed. "I’m afraid I know just what happened. The person who used to handle returns was ... Well, she’s no longer with us. So we’re undoubtedly guilty. What was the item?"

  Jane took a guess. "It looks like a sweater."

  The woman scanned the computer. "Yes. I see it. We’ll just send her another one."

  "That sounds like a good idea. And I’ll tell you what. Since it was just one of those things and you’re going to the expense of fixing it, why don’t you just tell her it was a mistake you discovered yourself without talking to us? It’ll seem like a happy coincidence."

  "Thank you so much," said the woman.

  "You’re welcome," said Jane. "Goodbye."

  She sat on the bed and thought about it. Lenore Sanders had managed to bounce back from the death of Jerry Cappadocia. She had left town and married somebody named Robert Cotton. Jane felt a strong curiosity about her that she couldn’t think of a way to justify. She certainly wasn’t going to find out anything about James Michael Martin from Lenore. The girlfriend hadn’t been present during the surveillance or she would have been mentioned in the report. She certainly wasn’t at the poker game the night Jerry was murdered.

  Jane leafed through the pile of newspapers she had collected over the past few days, until she found the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was a morning paper, so they would be very busy right now. She scanned the bylines for a name that fit. It had to be somebody in one of the distant offices. She dialed the number she found on the editorial page.

  "This is Ginny Surchow at the Washington bureau," she told the operator. "Can you connect me to research?"

  There was only a second of delay before a woman answered, "Research."

  "Hi," said Jane. "This is Ginny Surchow. I was wondering if you had anything for Mrs. Robert Cotton."

  "Mrs. Robert Cotton? Yeah, some advice on choosing a husband."

  Jane chuckled, not sure how funny that was. "Maybe I’d better start with him. Got a lot?"

  "What haven’t we got? Come on down and take a look. We’ll be here until they put the paper to bed."

  "I can’t come down. I’m in Washington. Just give me a quickie."

  "All right," said the woman. "Give me a minute." After the minute was up, the woman returned. "I have an article here that has him being investigated for money laundering in ’seventy-nine, another one for receiving stolen goods in ’eighty-two. He owned the warehouse and he owned the truck, but the guys on the scene said they were moving the TV sets on their own. In ’eighty-five it was drugs, but he was nowhere near them and there was something wrong with the evidence, so the charge went away. By ’eighty-nine, we start running articles describing other people as ’having connections’ with Cotton."

  "Anything really solid?" asked Jane.

  "No recent convictions that I can see. So he’s described in the late one
s as ’alleged organized crime figure.’ No, this last one has him promoted to ’suspected gang kingpin.’ "

  "I get the picture," said Jane. "Thanks."

  She hung up before the woman had a chance to ask her any questions. The whole exercise had been pointless. All she was doing now was filling in blank spaces in the story that didn’t need to be filled. Lenore Sanders had drifted out of the story entirely. She had gone off to another city and found herself a man who probably wasn’t noticeably different from Jerry Cappadocia. Jane knew all she was going to know about James Michael Martin.

  She picked up the telephone again and called Jake Reinert.

  "Janie?" he said. "Where are you?"

  "I’m sorry I had to leave without you, Jake," she said. "I just wanted to spend some time alone. You understand."

  "Where are you spending time alone?"

  "The beach. It’s very restful here, and I was having such a good time that I started to feel guilty about you."

  "Janie? Maybe you ought to come home."

  She rapped on the table beside her bed. "Oh." She called over her shoulder, "I’ll be right there," then said, "I’ve got to go. It’s dinner time here. And no, it’s not a date, worse luck. It’s just another woman I met on the beach. ’Bye."

  She turned in her key and left before dawn, driving along the perimeter of Tupper Lake slowly, stopping now and then to scan the shore. She drove up seven old logging roads before the sun came up without finding one that went farther than a few hundred yards. She knew it would be one of the old roads. From the time the Adirondacks had been surveyed, in the 1830s, until the government had decided to protect what was left of them, in the 1890s, logging had gone on unimpeded. After that it had been controlled in most of the park, but the roads were still visible in lots of places, even some of the old narrow-gauge railroad spurs that had been built to get the logs out. James Michael Martin had been born here, and he might even have picked out the one he would use while he was still sitting in his cell in Illinois.

  It was after ten when Jane saw the tire tracks on the old road above the lake. The road was now only a set of ruts that started in the marshy land along the lake and turned up into the forest immediately. Down in the flats, the tracks from his new tires were deep, with black mud mushroomed out of the lozenge-shaped depressions even after three days. As the trail swung up and away they faded, soon only an impression of a big weight that had crushed the growth of thistle and milk-weed and goldenrod that had healed the ancient ruts. As the trail went higher, the ground was hard, with rocks close to the surface and a network of roots where the big trees on both sides intertwined. There were places here and there where the thick plastering of last fall’s leaves had been rotted black by standing water or washed away by spring rains, and then she could see the tire treads again. There was still the chance that even this early in the year, when the deep drifts of snow had barely melted from the high peaks above the lake, this might only be innocent fishermen trying to get to the fish while they were still eager and hungry.