Thomas Perry - Runner

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.