Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

She went into the bathroom and looked at the items he had left on the counter: razor, toothpaste, comb, hairbrush, deodorant—just the usual stuff. She stepped back into the other room and noticed the wastebasket. She reached inside, unfolded the single piece of crumpled paper, and read it: “Come see me in Room 3165. Seaver.”

She had heard that name. Seaver was one of the names that Pete had mentioned when he was talking about the casino. Seaver was the one who had been told somebody was a problem just before Pete had read an obituary. But he hadn’t been some hit man. He was the chief of security for the whole company.

Jane put the crumpled paper back into the wastebasket. Seaver was the customer, the one who had hired the killers. He was the one who had been sitting in Las Vegas all this time, comfortable and immune, while they had gone out to hunt Pete Hatcher for him. They had murdered a young policeman in Denver and some unsuspecting tourist in Swan Lake, but nothing they had done could ever reflect on Seaver. He had kept his distance until now. What was he doing up here? Was he checking up on his employees? No. What could he say that would have made them try harder, and what sanctions could he apply if they failed? Probably he had considered it safer to hand them their final payment as soon as they came out of the mountains so they wouldn’t knock on his door in Las Vegas. It didn’t matter. He was here.

Jane hurried out to the Toyota, took one piece of luggage out of the cargo bay, went back into Seaver’s room, and knelt to slide it under the bed.

Jane drove to a supermarket in Whitefish, unloaded the rest of the men’s belongings into the big Dumpster behind the building, then drove back to Kalispell. It was the middle of the night when she parked the Toyota outside the gate of the rental agency. She threw the key over the fence so it hit the door of the office and dropped to the top step, where they couldn’t help finding it. Then she walked to the small airport at the edge of town and paid in hundred-dollar bills for a seat on the first flight to Los Angeles.

It was not until she was sure the weather had cleared enough and her flight was boarding that she went to a pay telephone and made her call to the police. She said quickly, “There’s a man in Room 3165 at the Rocky Mountain Lodge. He told me last night he killed that guy over in Swan Lake.” The woman on the other end was talking over her insistently, saying, “Your name, please. Give me your name.” But Jane said, “He showed me the gun,” and hung up. Probably the woman had not picked up everything she was saying, but it didn’t matter. They recorded all the calls, and in a minute she would be playing it back for some superior.

33

Seaver was in a daze. None of this felt real to him. The cell was like something out of the movies: old, with things written on the walls that had come from a succession of madmen stretching back at least a generation, thoughts that no functioning brain could contain scrawled in letters like shrieks, with every fifth word misspelled, and anatomical pictures that made him queasy.

Seaver couldn’t be here, not in his waking life. When the door had burst inward onto the floor he had been lying in bed, so maybe he had been asleep and what he saw now just proved that his subconscious was getting better at constructing nightmares. The guns had all been pointed at him as the intruders sidestepped to spread out around the bed. Some of the men had looked at him with cold contempt, but the faces of others were empty, just concentrating on lining up the sights with his chest, his head, his belly, waiting to fire.

He had known enough to lie motionless on his back, both arms stretched out from his sides as though he were being crucified. He had known that speaking was a bad strategy, not only because he might say something that would come back to haunt him but also because it was in his best interest to keep the ones with the empty faces calm. They would do the job they had been sent to do, and then they would realize they had the wrong man and leave.

Then one of them had dropped to his belly, slithered under the bed, and dragged out a long, narrow case, opened it, and nodded to the leader before he closed it. “He’s got it,” he said. Rough hands had rolled Seaver onto his belly, applied the handcuffs, dragged him to a car, and driven him to the local police station.

While he had been fingerprinted and photographed and searched and pushed into the cell, he had been thinking frantically, trying to catch up with time. They had to be after Earl. Somehow Earl had done this to him—read the note, slipped the gun under the bed, and left. Then Linda had called the police on the way out of town. He wanted to shout, “But why?” loudly enough so they could hear it. Was it just because he had violated the unspoken terms of their agreement and come to Montana? Or could Earl have thought that Seaver had grown so impatient that he had come here to get his advance money back?

Seaver kept reminding himself that it didn’t matter. He was in trouble, and he had to concentrate on what was going on now. The police had found his false driver’s license and credit cards. They had performed a trace metal detection test on his hands by swabbing them with hydroxyquinoline and holding them under ultraviolet light. He was fairly sure he was in the clear on that one, because the glowing purplish specks that indicated steel and brass were small enough to be ambiguous.

But they had also done an atomic-absorption test on his clothes. That was bad. He knew they must have found antimony, barium, and lead. The only defense he could think of was that he had worn the same clothes for legal target practice at home in Las Vegas and not gotten them cleaned. He could hardly say he hadn’t fired a gun in them. He had, but it had not been a rifle. It had been the pistol he had fired into the two men in New York City. The shorter barrel, close range, and downward angle probably accounted for why so much powder residue had stuck to his clothes.

Seaver might be able to account for most of the evidence in a trial if he got the right lawyer, but the rifle was like a mathematical problem that he couldn’t figure out how to approach. When the ballistics tests were completed, he knew they would show a match between a test-fired bullet and the bullet that had killed the man in Swan Lake. Otherwise there would have been no reason for Earl to plant it in his room. As Seaver reflected on it, the whole issue of the rifle was perhaps his biggest problem. The lieutenant who had first interrogated him had mentioned, almost casually, that it had come with a silencer. If it had a factory-made suppressor on it, then it had to be a military or police-only model. The prosecutor would drag out Seaver’s record and reduce his years of honorable service as a policeman into a set of connections that would make it possible for him to get his hands on a rifle like that—something not a lot of people could do.

He reviewed his own record from the point of view of a prosecutor. They could drag out his expert marksman ratings. Those would be far from enough to prove he could put a round through some guy’s temple at five hundred yards, but there wouldn’t be any other suspect around who could have done it on the best day of his life. The prosecutors would be sure to dig up his four shootings in the line of duty. The fact that four boards of inquiry had cleared him would mean nothing. Juries looked at internal investigations as what they were: routine, obligatory checks just to be sure there was nothing so obviously wrong with a shooting that the public was sure to recognize it instantly. The shootings would establish that Seaver had dropped the hammer on other men at least four times and not been turned into a shaking wreck by the experience.