Thomas Perry - Poison Flower

Jane opened her eyes, rested her chin on the blanket, and watched the mother appear at one window, then the next. Then she disappeared for a moment. The back door of the house opened, and then Mr. and Mrs. Martel went down the back steps carefully, and walked, arm in arm, toward their garage. Jane looked at her watch. It was after one thirty.

It was too late for them to be going anywhere for a social engagement. They had to be doing something extraordinary. Jane rolled up her blanket, went low, and trotted quietly along the ditch to the street where her car was parked. She got in behind the wheel, rolled down her windows, and waited. She heard a car door slam, and a moment later she heard a second one slam. The electric whirring of the garage door opener as it raised the door was surprisingly clear in the night air. She heard their car start, counted to thirty, then started her engine and moved ahead to the intersection. She sped up and turned the corner in time to see the Martel car at the end of the block, just disappearing into a right turn.

Jane had spent many hours thinking about the ways of following a car, because she had needed to be sure she wasn't making herself easy to tail. There were plenty of tricks-using two followers in cars and taking turns staying in sight, changing the driver's appearance every few miles, passing on a long, straight stretch and then watching through the mirror instead of the windshield. Police departments sometimes installed two different sets of headlights so they could change the way their cars looked from the front. Others planted electronic transmitters or GPS units and followed without ever coming in sight. Tonight Jane could only drop back as far as possible and stay aware.

It was unlikely that the Martels were very good at spotting a tail, but even in a city the size of Indianapolis, there was much less traffic to hide her Honda as the clock moved toward two a.m. She tried to stay behind a car that was going in the same direction, but it soon turned and disappeared. She knew that the moment of greatest danger for her would be when the Martel car stopped for a red light. That would give the driver-probably the father-nothing to do for a couple of minutes but keep his foot on the brake. He would spend some part of it looking into his rearview mirror at whoever was coming up behind him.

A light ahead of the Martels turned red. Jane continued to the next intersection ahead of her, turned right, went about thirty feet, turned around, nosed out at the corner where she had just turned, and looked up the main road toward the Martels.

The Martel car didn't wait for the red light. The driver paused at the edge of the intersection for a second, saw there was no car coming to his left or right, and accelerated through and kept going.

Jane hesitated. If she came after them, the Martels would see her car and think she was a cop who had witnessed the infraction. The driver wouldn't be able to take his eyes off her. She stayed where she was, waiting and watching their car move farther and farther ahead. She waited until it had moved far enough along the slight curve of the road so a glance in the rearview mirror would not include her pulling back onto the road and following.

There was something she had not anticipated. She had hoped they had simply been told to wait until the middle of the night to visit their son. But they seemed to be doing things that would force a follower to reveal himself. Had Daniel told them to do that Were they so wised-up on their own They didn't look like criminals, and they didn't live like criminals, but neither did their son.

Jane sped up. Her turn and pause had reduced the likelihood that they would recognize her car as the one behind them earlier. She was virtually starting over again as just another car that happened to be out late. Another stoplight was coming up. It was already red. Probably now that Jane was visible again, they would be afraid to run it.

No. The driver tapped the brakes at the intersection, then accelerated through it. Jane kept coming. She was far enough behind them so that she arrived at the intersection just as the signal turned green.

The Martels were speeding. Jane hadn't thought much about it at first, but now that she was closer, she could tell that they weren't just a bit over the limit. They were going at least fifty in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone. She concentrated on keeping her distance steady by timing lights without going too fast. No matter how eager she was to find out where they were going tonight, she couldn't afford to be pulled over by a police officer.

At the next big intersection the Martel car turned to the left. Jane followed it into the left-turn lane, but she was too late to catch the green light. She watched, and saw the car far away, making a right turn into a driveway at the side of a large building.

When the light changed, she followed; then she saw a big red sign that read, "Emergency," and a blue sign that read, "St. Vincent Hospital." She made the turn and followed the driveway up the side of the building in time to see the Martel car stopped under the roof at the emergency room entrance. The wife was out of the driver's seat, and she and an orderly were helping her husband get into a wheelchair.

Jane drifted past and turned to enter a parking lot about fifty yards away. She swung into a parking space and switched off her engine and lights. The orderly wheeled Mr. Martel into the doorway where the doors automatically slid apart to admit them. The wife seemed torn, doing a little dance toward the doors, then looking back at her car sitting there blocking the entrance circle with both doors open and its engine running. She ran to it, slammed the passenger door, continued around the front end, got into the driver's seat, and drove the rest of the way around the circle.

Jane realized that there was only one place for Mrs. Martel to go. Jane rolled over into the back seat of her car, then pulled the blanket over her. Seconds later she heard the car pull into the space beside hers. The engine stopped, the door slammed, and she heard the sound of high heels clicking away toward the emergency room entrance. She waited for a few minutes, then sat up. The lot was empty of people again for the moment.

What this looked like was a heart attack. The wife's erratic driving had nothing to do with being followed. She had not noticed other cars and had not cared. She had just been rushing her husband to the hospital.

Jane stayed where she was and watched for cars coming up the driveway to the emergency room. There was an ambulance. Two big male EMTs pulled a gurney out the back. There was a small, slim girl EMT with long black hair tied tight behind her head perched on the gurney above the patient, doing chest compressions to restore his heartbeat as the gurney clattered through the doors into the emergency room.

A few minutes later, a car pulled up and six teenagers-three boys and three girls-got out. In front, one of the boys was holding his left arm as though it was giving him pain.

It was nearly an hour before a black Porsche wheeled into the lot and parked. Jane listened while the door slammed, then waited for the sound of male footsteps, trying but failing to determine where the man was. Finally she raised her head a bit and looked. It was Daniel Martel. He walked in long, quick strides to the emergency room door and disappeared.

Jane got out of her car and walked to his. She saw that the Nevada license plates had been replaced by Indiana plates. She wrote the license number on a receipt, then the VIN number from the top of the dashboard, on the chance that having it would help her find the address he was using here. She checked to see if he had forgotten to lock the car, then to see if he had left a window open a crack, but it was a halfhearted effort because she knew Martel wasn't the type. She also felt fairly sure that Martel would have bought whatever optional high-end alarm system Porsche offered, so she left the car alone.