Thomas Perry - Runner

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 began 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.