Thomas Perry - Runner

Jane took her kit, her guns, and her bicycle to the garage and loaded them into the SUV. She knew she needed a safer place to hide her vehicle this time, so she drove to a hotel on the road to Rancho Santa Fe, rented a room, and parked in the parking structure where her SUV would not be visible. Then she put on her pack, took her bicycle out and rode it to the estate bordering the Beale house where she had climbed the wall on her earlier visit. She walked her bicycle into the oak woods off the road, left it in a dry creek bed, and covered it with leaves and fallen branches, then walked toward the Beale estate.

She came onto the estate by climbing the tree and using the overhanging limb she had used earlier. Before moving on, she found her half-stripped sapling and made sure it was in place in case she needed a ladder to reach the top of the wall again.

Once she had moved through the pine woods at the back of the Beale land, she crawled to the edge of the lawn to study the buildings. There was no sign that anyone was waiting. It was only three in the afternoon, nine hours early, but Jane wasn't sure yet that she was alone. She needed to reach the house without being seen. After she had waited an hour without hearing a sound from the house or seeing anyone pass a window, she decided it was time to move.

She stepped quietly along the back of the big garage, skirting the open lawn, and then walked to the back of the pool house. She didn't want to go any farther and leave the pool house behind her without first being sure no one had chosen it as the place to wait in ambush. She stepped to the doorway and peered inside, then slipped in and opened cabinets and drawers. She stared through each of the windows to determine what parts of the house and yard could be seen from there. She was almost ready to leave, when she opened the cabinet under the sink in the bar and found a gun. It was a .45 Glock, loaded, with a round in the chamber and the safety off. She took out the magazine, cleared the round, buried the magazine in the flower bed beside the pool house, and then returned the gun to its hiding place.

When she reached the side of the house, she stepped along it until she found the electric meter and circuit breakers. She could see the wheel in the meter turning very slowly, as though the only things still drawing current were the electric displays on the built-in appliances.

She opened her pack, took out her roll of monofilament fishing line, tied it to the master power switch beside the circuit box, and then ran it around a bar in the iron fence surrounding the pool, and finally along the side of the main house to the garden. She tested the line once by tugging it to turn off the power to the house, then went back to the box and closed the switch again.

The next step was to find a good way into the house. She approached the sliding door to the main room. Through the glass she examined the latch that locked it to the doorframe. She jiggled the door on its track. It was an expensive, well-fitted door: It wouldn't move from side to side. She tried grasping the handle and lifting the door straight up, and found that she could lift it nearly an inch. The wheels that held it on its track could be raised or lowered by adjustment screws recessed on the inner side of the door, and it was clear to her that nobody had adjusted them for years, so they had gotten very loose.

What she needed now was something she could use as a pry bar. There was nothing in the garden, but she remembered seeing a barbecue set in one of the drawers below the counter in the pool house. She went back and selected a big butcher knife. She returned to the sliding door, knelt, and lifted it again, pushed the knife into the space beneath it and moved it until she found the spring-loaded wheel under the door. She used the blade to hold the wheel up, and pushed the door off its track. Then she slipped the blade into the space she'd created between the door and frame, and lifted the latch. She lifted the door to set the wheel back onto its track, put the knife into her pack, and stepped inside.

She explored the interior of the house. The moving crew had taken everything that could be removed. The bare floors and walls made her footsteps echo as she went from room to room. On the ground floor there was a row of bedroom suites with bathrooms between them, and then at the end of the long hallway she came to one room that had a damaged wall.

The plaster had been dug away in two places under the window, as though someone had tried to burrow through the wall. Jane went to the window and looked out, then realized what it was. The holes in the wall were almost exactly in the places where the bars over the window were anchored. Somebody had been trying to remove the bars from the inside. Jane looked more closely and saw scratches on the plaster that looked like knife marks. These weren't part of some remodeling project. There were no drill holes or chiseled spots. Someone had tried to dig out of here with a knife—Christine.

It was obvious that Richard Beale had no intention of setting Christine free. The damaged plaster reminded Jane of the possibility that Christine was already dead. She might even be buried somewhere on this estate. She had been missing from her apartment in Minneapolis for about a month, and the plot of land around this house was huge. A girl like Christine, still weak from giving birth, would have been easy enough to kill, and then she could have been buried deep in one of the flower beds where the soil was soft and moist and free of stones and roots. They could have buried her and then transplanted a few flats of poppies and petunias over her. These were rich people. They could have had a crew plant a full-grown tree, or even cover Christine's body with a new section of driveway.

If Christine was dead, Jane knew, she would probably never find the body. San Diego had the Pacific Ocean to the west, and hundreds of miles of lonely deserts and mountains to the east. But she had seen the movers carrying a crib and boxes of toys. They wouldn't do that unless the baby was alive.

The second time through the house, Jane counted steps and judged angles, looking out windows to determine what could be seen and what couldn't from each of them. She studied the great room without its furniture, trying to detect hiding places. First she checked the inside of the fireplace, but found no guns. Then she checked the guest bathroom just off the big room, and found the second pistol. She unloaded it and taped it where she'd found it. She went into the garage, noticed a rope and a light stepladder, carried them out to two sections of the wall around the property that she had never visited, and hid them. She suspected that she might have to go over the wall again, and she wanted as many ways up and out as possible. Jane turned on the battery-operated baby monitor, climbed the shelves to the top of one of the built-in bookcases in the big room, and placed it there.

She took advantage of the waning daylight to study every part of the place. All the time while she worked, she was listening for the sound of someone else arriving. There was sparse traffic on the road beyond the high hedges. Each time she heard a car approach, she listened for the noise of the front gate opening. But there were only the calls of the birds in the surrounding groves of trees and an occasional flutter of leaves from a sudden warm gust off the desert. Jane unlocked several windows and two service doors on the wings of the house so she would be able to come in and out at will.

When everything was done, Jane went upstairs into the master bedroom, where she could see the grounds through windows on three sides. As she studied the estate, she picked out the places where Steve Demming might set up a sniper's nest to kill her, and calculated the angles from the house to the places where she could find the ladder and rope she'd left near the wall. She saw the hiding places she would have to check for enemies, and the false hiding places where a person would be more vulnerable rather than less: the low hedges near the house that would obscure a person but would make noise and reveal movement.