Thomas Perry - Blood Money

“It’s what I do,” Jane had answered. “Fugitives come to me and I guide them out of the world.”

“Why?”

“Because if I didn’t, they would give me bad dreams.”

And Martha had said, “I’ll bet a lot of them do anyway.” The words came back now, but they came in her own voice.

Jane tried to think about what she was doing. She concentrated on the charities. There were a lot of resonant names, and she knew intellectually that each one represented thousands of people who were hungry or sick or desperate. But she could not force the charities to fill the space that the truth fit in.

Maybe what had induced her to concoct this scheme was that she had needed a reason to do what Bernie had asked her to. She had known that she could not tell herself that Bernie “the Elephant” Lupus was an innocent victim, so she had thought up a price he would have to pay for her services.

But what was Jane McKinnon doing offering her services at any price? She had been trying to keep herself from thinking about Carey, but here he was again. She had not just been happy with Carey, but also happy about Carey—happy that he loved her above all others, happy to spend time with him, happy to be Mrs. McKinnon. She found herself gazing through the doorway at the telephone in the living room.

She forced herself to look at her computer screen. This time she had to be more cautious than ever. If she made a mistake or simply ran out of luck, there must be no way that the trail could lead to Carey. Delfina had traced Rita as far as Niagara Falls, and that was uncomfortably close to home. If something went wrong in this house, it was likely that someone would obtain a list of the telephone calls that had been made.

It was better if she didn’t try to explain to Carey what she was doing, anyway. It would worry him, confuse him, and offer him no comfort. She had already warned him that she might not be able to call for a long time, and that would have to stand until she had some reason to believe the danger was over.

Carey would get by. She had joked to him that he was a low-maintenance husband, but it had not exactly been a joke. He had already grown up and become a successful surgeon before he had convinced her to marry him. There had been no need for her to provide any of the usual contributions: money, work, even patience. She had moved into the big old stone house in Amherst built on land an ancestor of his had bought from her ancestors in the 1790s. McKinnons had expanded and remodeled it so many times that it had needed no modification to accommodate the marriage.

Carey was like the house: he had been built and improved, and the mistakes had been corrected before she had arrived. He had reached his final form. He was self-reliant and his mind was fully occupied. Carey was a person who knew what his days were going to be from now until he was too old to do anything. No matter how extravagantly Jane wanted to give, there was not even time for him to accept. He left for the surgical wing of the hospital at six-thirty each morning, and returned after his last rounds at eight in the evening. If Jane came to the hospital to have lunch with him, the doctors and nurses he saw every day would come in and join them at the table. In a clannish town like Buffalo, most people couldn’t conceive of a husband and wife wanting to sit alone at lunch, unless they were having a fight.

Jane detected an odd tone in her thoughts. What she had been thinking was not exactly false, but it had started to sound like a too elaborate collection of excuses. It didn’t explain why Jane had not gone home the minute Rita was out of sight, or why she was in a house in New Mexico with this strange assortment of people, engaged in this peculiar scheme.

Jane kept typing and printing while, one by one, the others left the dining room. First Bernie got up and climbed the stairs. Then it was Rita. An hour later, even Henry Ziegler stood and closed his laptop computer.

Jane said casually, “Henry, how long do you think it’s going to take?”

Ziegler shrugged. “It’s up to Bernie, really. It just depends on how much he remembers and writes down.”

“The minute you see the end coming, let me know.”

15

Jane awoke suddenly in the dark. She unwrapped herself from the blanket and sat up on the couch in the living room. A light shone from the crack under the swinging door to the dining room. She listened. The muted, steady clacking of computer keys was punctuated by the rhythmic sound of the printer cycling to roll out pages. She held her watch to her face, and moved it to the side to catch a little moonlight and determine that it was three A.M., then walked to the door and pushed it open.

The rheostat that controlled the dining room chandelier had been turned low, but the light still irritated her eyes. Henry Ziegler’s face was bathed in the eerie phosphorescence of the display on his computer screen. She said quietly, “You never sleep, do you?”

Ziegler started in his chair, then saw Jane and slumped, his shoulders rounding as he took a few breaths to calm himself. “You startled me,” he said. “Sorry if I woke you up. I thought I’d use the time to get the next part of this done. The papers for the corporate foundations I set up are starting to arrive at the hotel in piles.”

“I didn’t ask what you were doing,” she said. “I asked about sleep.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said, but his eyes returned to his computer screen before he said it.

Jane persisted. “I was with you at night in Beverly Hills, then met you the next morning to find you had already done a day’s work. The same thing happened at the hotel downtown after we got here. Now you’re at it again. Is it drugs?”

Henry raised his eyes to her and shook his head. “It’s probably a disease, but I don’t know what kind. I never told a doctor, but it hasn’t killed me yet.”

“How long have you been this way?”

“I don’t know. I think since I was born. My mother always told everybody what a colicky baby I was. From the time I can remember, I would lie in bed on one side until I got stiff and sore, then roll over onto the other until the same thing happened. Around dawn I would doze off for a couple of hours. One night when I was about eight, I got up. The next night I went to sleep right away and woke up after a couple of hours. The next night, the same. It’s been that way ever since.”

Jane’s sleep-dulled brain moved through several thoughts. She remembered George Hawkes saying that twenty-five years ago, when Ziegler had just started as an accountant, he had gone to law school at night. It had not occurred to her that it had been all night. She also had a dim memory of reading somewhere that Napoleon had slept about as little as Ziegler. “Well, I guess I’m awake too,” she muttered. “I may as well put in a few hours.” She sat at her computer and flipped the switch, then watched the screen light up and run its self-test sequence. “What’s next?”

Henry held up a few sheets of paper so she could see the top one. “Write me a form letter for each of these corporate foundations. The number beside each one is the amount they have to give away. Pick a few charities off the list on this other sheet for each one, print the letters, sign them with the name of the president. Then stack them in a pile over here. When I’m done with this, I’ll go through the stack and cut the checks. When Rita gets up, she can print the labels and stuff, stamp and stack the envelopes.”

“Got it,” said Jane. She set to work. After one day, she was already getting used to the work, and it went more quickly. It was like a game. The big charities got a million or more. The small ones got three or four hundred thousand dollars. The surnames of the corporate officers were all common and familiar, ones that she or Ziegler had taken from telephone directories and given first names and initials at random. Jane signed some with obscuring flourishes, some with illegible squiggles. She had been forging documents for over a decade, and she was good at making signatures that looked real.