Thomas Perry - Blood Money

Delfina’s eyes were sharp as he stared at Zinni. “And you think the picture is the same woman—the one who slipped Nancy Carmody out?”

“I know it is,” Zinni asserted. “It’s her.”

Delfina was silent for a few seconds. For six years he had kept Nancy Carmody in the back of his mind, and other, newer problems had piled in on top. It was clear to him that he had not heard the whole story at the time. When the waitress had not turned up, he’d had Stolnick executed, so the immediate danger she represented had passed. “You know anything about this woman?”

“She’s got to be some kind of pro,” said Mino.

Delfina sighed. To these guys, the process of thought was like carrying big rocks to a river to use as stepping-stones. They would drop one in, then have to turn around and go all the way back to find the next one, carry it out, and drop it. “We’ll have to move fast.”

“On what?”

“Al, call Oakland. Get your guys to call all our people in cities across the country. Have them make a lot of copies of that picture—say, a couple of thousand each. We’ve got to get them to all the families as fast as we can. Tell them Rita Shelford has been spotted, and this woman was with her. Nothing else. Got it?”

“Sure, but what does it mean?”

“It means that we have to find a phone booth.”

Mino stopped the car at a gas station and got out to use one of the pay telephones along the fence where cars were parked waiting for service. After a second, Delfina’s impatience goaded him out of the car to the telephone beside Mino’s. He called his underbosses in Niagara Falls, Omaha, Los Angeles, and Boston and repeated his orders.

When he was back in Mino’s car, he sat with his eyes on the roof above his head, trying to assess his position. He had given up some of the information he had that the other bosses didn’t. That was bad. But they would finally be convinced that he was joining in the general hunt for Bernie’s money, and that was, on the whole, good. Now he had to decide exactly what his position was going to be after they found this woman for him.

21

Jane awoke slowly, listening for the clacking of the keys on Ziegler’s keyboard, then opened her eyes to look for the light under the door. When she found it, the crack of light wasn’t where it was supposed to be. She sat up in bed and remembered. The light under the door was the hotel hallway. This was the Olympic Hotel, and it was in Seattle.

The five-hundred-mile trip up the Pacific coast from San Diego to San Francisco had taken her a full day. The only stops she had made had been near mailboxes and post offices, sometimes to drop a single envelope in a slot. She had stayed one night in San Francisco, then spent most of the next day flying to Portland and Seattle, mailing more letters.

So far, everything had gone exactly as she had planned. California was a tenth of the population of the country, so there had been many stops. Portland and Seattle were smaller, so on her last flight she had been able to fold one empty duffel bag and put it inside the other with the rest of the mail. She had used the name Wendy Stein to rent the car, then been Katherine Webster in San Francisco, and Diane Finley on the flight to Seattle. When she had arrived at the hotel, the boxes of new letters had been waiting for her.

She had taken two hours emptying the boxes and packing the letters in her two duffel bags in the proper order, so the first bundles would be at the top. Then she had flattened the cardboard boxes, torn the mailing stickers off them, and carried them to the Dumpster in the little enclosure behind the building. After that, she had tried to go to sleep, but couldn’t. From the moment when she had dropped the first envelopes in Albuquerque, she had been aware that she had started the clock. It would take only a day or two before the first checks arrived at the offices of charities. She had tried to make those two days count, but now she was stopped. She had to wait until morning for her flight to Minneapolis to begin her run through the Midwest. It was only when the clock by the bed said two A.M. that she was able to assuage the feeling of nervous eagerness. The bags were ready, the tickets were in her purse on the table, and the reservations were confirmed for the rest of the trip. It was now five o’clock in the East, and she knew that while she slept, Henry Ziegler would already be in the car she had reserved for him, driving up the coast dropping envelopes in places like Orlando, Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston. Even if the least likely of the possible disasters had already happened, and someone had connected the sudden dispersal of big money with Bernie Lupus, it was almost impossible that anyone would connect the event with Henry Ziegler. Probably no wiseguy had ever heard of him. And Henry would be traveling in the safest, most anonymous way, staying out of airports.

Jane slept for four hours, then woke up to discover that she had regained her strength and alertness. She called the desk downstairs to have a bellman pick up her two large bags and summon a taxi for Sea-Tac airport. She showered and dressed quickly and hurried down to settle her bill. In a few days it would be over.

At the airport, Jane dragged her two bags a few feet to the end of the line of passengers waiting to check their luggage at the curb. When the skycaps had taken them, she entered the terminal, walked through the row of metal detectors, and began to assess the crowds of people in the waiting areas. She was trying to pick out the two or three men who would be watching for Rita Shelford, but she saw immediately that things had changed. There seemed to be more of them than there had been in San Diego. The man near the end of the first aisle studying something in his briefcase was a strong candidate. He kept dipping his eyes to stare down at the open case, then looking up at people walking past him on the concourse. At first she thought it was possible that he was a police officer of some kind, but she dismissed the thought. His shoes were too nice. Cops never forgot that they were likely to spend a lot of time on their feet before the end of the shift, and might even have to chase someone down who was younger and faster, then wrestle with him. They didn’t like leather soles and pointed toes.

She knew the man couldn’t be looking for her, but she was glad to get past him. A few minutes later her eyes settled on a man walking along ahead of her. He turned his head to the right, and Jane followed his eyes. He had looked directly at a man sitting in the waiting area. The man stood up and began to walk too.

Jane kept going at the same pace, stepped closer to the middle of the concourse, where people at the sides wouldn’t get as good a look at her, and watched the two men work. She tried to figure out whether they had spotted someone who looked like Rita, but it was difficult to tell. Ahead of her there were lots of people of all sizes and shapes.

The first man stepped into the stream of people ahead, stopped abruptly in front of the one he suspected, and stared up at the sign hanging from the ceiling above his head that had an arrow and the words GATES 10–22. The second man stopped behind, hemming the victim in. He had his hand in his pocket, and in it, Jane knew, would be something he wasn’t supposed to have in an airport—maybe a blade made of sharpened plastic. But when the man who had caused the jam pivoted awkwardly and took a close look into the face of the victim, he muttered an apology and stepped quickly aside.

The victim stepped off again, pulling her rolling suitcase by its extended handle. Jane hurried to catch up with the woman before the two men had time to circle back to their positions, where Jane would have to pass them.