Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Foley frowned. “What does that mean?”

Seaver said, “They haven’t finished yet.”

Salateri shook his head in disgust but said nothing. To Seaver’s surprise, it was Buckley who pursued it. “Doesn’t that make you … a little uncomfortable?”

Seaver resisted the glib, easy answer. “It’s not as quick as I had hoped,” he conceded. “But I’m not concerned. I picked these people because I was confident that they would be able to find him and take care of it quietly, without the sorts of problems these matters can sometimes cause.” He held his palms up. “I still think so. The delay just means that the professional who helped Hatcher disappear also helped him stay hidden for a while.”

Foley snorted. “I think it’s time to ask a few specific questions. Just who are these people?”

“Their names are Earl Bliss and Linda Thompson. They have a detective agency in Los Angeles.”

“Why did you pick them?”

“They’ve done a few things for me and for acquaintances of mine, and they’ve always delivered. The choice of specialists isn’t very good. They’re the best of a bad lot.”

Foley’s brows knitted. “A bad lot?”

“As a rule, paragons of mental health don’t do wet jobs. Usually the people available for that kind of work have felony records. They look like they’ve spent a lot of time lifting weights in some exercise yard and have lots of memorable tattoos. They’ve all learned that you can get out of just about any sentence if you’ve got something juicy to tell the authorities about somebody else, and they’re all certain to be in trouble again. So they can be a problem that doesn’t go away.”

“What’s different about the ones you hired?” asked Foley. “Are they paragons of mental health?”

“I can only guess, and I would guess not. But they don’t seem to have problems that get in the way. And these people fit the Pete Hatcher problem.”

“How?”

“They’ve done a lot of skip-tracing and bail-jump cases, so they’re set up to find people quietly and without fuss. If they get noticed while they’re looking, they can say they’re on that kind of case, and show licenses to make it believable. There are two of them, and this kind of work is best done in pairs, which is why police officers work that way. If you have to, you can watch a building twenty-four hours a day, and it’s very hard to slip behind someone who can look in two directions at once. And one of them is a woman. Two men together are probably a team of some kind, but two people of different sexes are just ‘a couple.’ ”

Salateri seemed to be bursting, but he confined himself to a measured tone. “If they’re so good, why is it taking them so long to find one guy? It’s been almost four months.”

Seaver sighed. “The Justice Department has seventy thousand people, and sometimes it takes them twenty years.” He saw that this did not please the three men, and he regretted having let it slip out. “I don’t mean to be flippant. But the problem isn’t going out and finding the Pete Hatcher we knew. He has professional help. She’s probably been doing everything for him. At some point he’ll stop paying her, and he’ll be on his own again. He’ll float to the surface.”

Max Foley blinked his eyes, took off his glasses, and set them on the table, then produced a white handkerchief and meticulously cleaned the tinted lenses. “How do I put this?” he asked himself. “The world is a complicated place, full of pieces that somehow fit together, and each one affects the others. Most people just don’t know how.”

Seaver could sense that what was coming was terribly important, and that he would need to catch every word and remember it. Then it seemed to him that they might be about to fire him. He waited anxiously.

Foley put on his glasses and his eyes widened to look at Seaver. “That’s what we do—the three of us here. Together we know how the pieces fit. It can’t be written down. It’s too much for one person to keep in his head, so we each know one part completely, and some of the rest.”

Buckley said, “We think we haven’t explained our problem well enough to you.”

Seaver began to wonder. There were worse things than being fired. Maybe he was about to hear a description of one of them. “Explained what—Pete Hatcher?”

Buckley nodded. His arm came up in one of his vague, limp gestures. “And so on.”

Seaver could feel the danger. “All my life I’ve operated on orders,” he said. “If I got the orders wrong, I apologize. Repeat them, and I’ll do my best. But I don’t need to know any more than I do.”

“Who said you had a choice?” snapped Salateri.

Peter Buckley gave a deprecating smile and said, “You think we’re going to tell you something that will make you a liability. That’s perceptive, but I’m afraid there’s nothing we could tell you that would make you more vulnerable than you already are.” A moment went by. “Now you’re thinking that we’re going to tell you something intended to give you a better appreciation for the importance of Pete Hatcher: what we win if we win, what we lose if we lose. If that happened we wouldn’t be sorry, but that’s not why you’re here. We’re hoping that if we tell you more, you’ll think of new ways to help us.”

“I’ll try,” said Seaver.

“You know we gave Pete Hatcher quite an education,” said Foley. “We started him in personnel with Stella. Then we had him work customer service on the hotel side for a while. First the tennis shop, then he was a starter at the golf course. Then we shifted him to the casino side. He worked the floor as a runner for the pit bosses.” He turned to his partners. “Help me here.”

“Finance,” said Buckley. “First purchasing, then accounts. Then I think it was entertainment.”

“Right,” said Salateri. “Ticket sales, then booking.” He glared at Seaver. “I think that was when we sent him to you.”

Seaver nodded.

“Then we started promoting him. He seemed to have potential,” said Buckley. “He was young, not a genius, but not stupid. He didn’t care how hard he had to work, he seemed to get by just fine. He had one rare and special gift. That was the way he got along with people. Everybody liked Pete Hatcher: grandmas, little kids, people from foreign countries who might interpret some normal gesture as an insult.”

Salateri looked as though he were sucking on something sour. “We gave him a taste of everything. We trusted him with little things, then tried bigger things. He never let us down.”

Buckley sighed wistfully. “We began to rely on him. That was where we got into trouble. Las Vegas is a special place. There’s never been anything like it in the world. When the country goes into a recession, we do better. People flock here in the summer, when you can burn your hand on the roof of a car. Sometimes it seems as though the laws of economics don’t apply here. But they do.”

“This is a business like any other,” said Foley. “If this company is going to survive, it has to diversify, expand, form alliances. Staying put means dying. We’ve presented Pleasure Island as a family attraction. We may have done ourselves incalculable good for the future, but in the meantime, it has cut the number of dollars we take in per customer. Kids don’t spend much. All they use is the beds and the food, which we practically give away to attract business.”

“We’ve looked into other areas,” said Buckley.

Foley said, “One we’ve been studying is off-site gambling. The attraction is obvious. At some point, the number of people who can fly here and bring serious money to the tables will reach a peak. Other companies have already figured out that they can start casinos near big population centers—first in New Jersey, then on riverboats in the Midwest, then Indian reservations. Each casino somewhere else clogs one healthy artery and turns the flow from there into a trickle. So we looked into growing some new arteries.”