Thomas Perry - Blood Money

At Chicago, Jane turned south. Late on the second evening, she stopped the Explorer at a fast-food restaurant outside Urbana. While she waited for the waitress to pack the food she had ordered, she went to the pay telephone in the corner by the ladies’ room. She put in coins and dialed the number that Henry Ziegler had given her. She held her breath as the telephone rang. It was long after business hours in Boston, but she knew that it would make no difference to Henry. The phone rang again, and she heard his voice. “Yes?”

Jane said, “I thought you probably wouldn’t be home sleeping. I just wanted to know that you made it.”

He said, “I’ve been wanting to call you, too, but nobody answered in New Mexico.”

“The last ones went into the mail two days ago,” she said. “They’ll probably arrive tomorrow.”

“We did it?” said Henry.

“We did it,” she said. “Now stay safe. And thanks.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “If you ever need me again, you know where I am.”

Jane laughed. “I should have that kind of money. Got to go.” She hung up, paid the waitress for the take-out dinners, and walked to the Explorer. She kept heading south, then turned east.

Jane turned the Explorer off the highway just across the Indiana state line in Terre Haute, and began to search the town. Bernie woke up after a few minutes and rubbed his eyes. “What are we doing?”

“Looking for the right kind of hotel,” she said.

“What’s the right kind?”

“I’ll know it if I see it. There are some hotels that are near airports and big interstate highways. They have the feel of places where people in a big hurry would stop. What I want is the sort of place you would stop if you were on vacation, or maybe the kind where local people go to have dinner.”

Jane found the hotel near the Wabash River. It was called the Davis House, and it had the feel of a country inn or a bed-and-breakfast house, but it wasn’t small enough to require compromises in privacy or anonymity. She rented three rooms on the second floor, and brought the others in after she had examined the grounds and walked the hallways.

Once they were settled, Jane gathered them in her room. When they came in, she was busy laying out clothes on her bed. “Are you leaving us again?” Rita asked.

“Not exactly,” said Jane. “I’m going on an errand in the morning, but I should be back by nightfall. If everything goes well, we’ll stay here tomorrow night too.”

“That would be great,” said Rita. “The last couple of times I fell asleep, I had dreams about getting a shower and sleeping in a real bed.”

Bernie said, “What if it doesn’t go so well?”

“I’m sure that the Explorer still hasn’t been seen. I’ll leave that here for you and take a rental car. If I’m not back tomorrow night, don’t get worried. If I’m not back by the next night, start making plans that don’t include me.”

“You don’t have to do this,” said Bernie. “You said it yourself in Santa Fe. We’ve already done the best thing with our lives that we could have done if we’d had the sense to plan it that way. We won.”

“It’s not enough,” said Jane. “We made an agreement. When we’ve lived up to it, then it will be over.”

Jane went out to rent a car and buy a few last items, then made the telephone call to the prison in the name of Elizabeth Moody. Before dawn the next morning she got into the rental car and drove across the state line into Illinois. She took Interstate 70 to Effingham, then 57 south all the way to Marion. She approached the federal prison at Marion in the afternoon.

The high walls and the guard towers were relics of another era, when prisons looked medieval instead of industrial. She reminded herself that what she was about to do was participate in a ritual. The procedures, the movements, were already established.

She walked to the gate at ten minutes before nine and waited with the other visitors. At nine, a guard with a clipboard came to the gate to let the visitors in one at a time. There were a lot of wives, mostly young women with faces they tried to keep expressionless, a few of them with little children who seemed to have no awe or alarm at the horrible place. There were two men in suits carrying briefcases like Jane’s, and she listened carefully to what they said. When it was her turn she spoke to the guard in a clear but bored voice. “Attorney here to see a client. The name is Elizabeth Moody.”

The guard did a leisurely perusal of the sheet on his clipboard, looking a bit like a maître d’ checking restaurant reservations. He made a notation beside one of the lines, and opened the door. Jane went inside to a reception desk, where she was supposed to fill out a form and sign it, then endured more waiting, watched a guard make a cursory search of her briefcase, and passed through a metal detector to another waiting area.

Another guard came in and called for Elizabeth Moody, and ushered her down a long hallway past a couple of barred gates that the guard opened in front of her, then closed behind her as soon as she was past. He put her into a little room with no windows except for a small Plexiglas square on the door with chicken-wire reinforcement between the panes.

She sat in one of the two battered metal chairs at a bare table and waited some more. When the guard returned, he had his hand on the arm of another man, but for a second Jane thought there must have been some mistake. He was much thinner and healthier looking than she had remembered from the newspapers. He was wearing prison jeans and a work shirt, and the general impression he conveyed was odd, until she identified it: he looked too clean. That was the only way of saying it. Priests who wore street clothes sometimes looked like that. His features had not really changed. He appeared to be in his mid-forties—although she knew he was older—with thick, dark, wavy hair that seemed to start a quarter inch too low on his forehead. He was looking at her with eyes that showed little interest.

Jane concentrated on the guard. “Thank you,” she said to him. When he stood still, she gazed at him expectantly for a few seconds. He seemed to recollect himself, then turned and went outside.

As soon as the door closed, Jane held out her hand without smiling. “Good afternoon, Mr. Ogliaro. I’m Elizabeth Moody.”

Ogliaro leaned forward, grasped her hand and shook it once, then released it unenthusiastically. “Didn’t Zabel come with you?”

Jane had studied the Detroit newspapers’ articles about the trial on the Internet while she was in Santa Fe. In the early stages, there was always a partner in the firm Zabel, Dunstreet and Bibberly giving the reporter a denial of each of the charges. Later, Zabel had given the summation. When Jane had made her appointment at the prison, she had said she was an associate in the firm.

“Not today,” said Jane. “This isn’t about your appeals. I’m not a criminal litigator, I’m a specialist in the firm’s financial division. I’m just here to take care of some business.”

Ogliaro sat down at the table. He said, “What is it?”

Jane sat across from him and began taking papers out of her briefcase. “A few papers to look over.” She handed him the first one.

He glared at it. “Interglobal insurance company? What do they want—to sell me a policy?”

Jane said, “It’s something that came to us because our office is listed as your address for business purposes right now. Your mother was Francesca Giannini Ogliaro. Is that correct?”

“Right.”

“And she passed away recently?”

He nodded, looking at her warily. “What’s this about?”

“In 1948, she apparently purchased a single premium variable lifetime annuity for you from Interglobal Life and Casualty.”