Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Bennis’s voice was calm. He sounded as though he were on the other side of a huge chasm, watching a disaster that had nothing to do with him. “You know them, Cal. They make a decision, and that’s their decision. You don’t talk them out of something like that.”

“You’re right,” said Seaver. “I’m glad you told me. And you know what else? I’m glad you’re the one they picked to replace me. You deserve it.”

Seaver hung up and took two steps back toward his hotel. He was tired, and had to sleep. No, there was no way he could go back up there and sit around all night. He had told Bennis he was in Missoula. He had to get on a plane.

He looked at his watch. It was three in the morning. What was the date? September 16—no, 17. It was a date that he would always remember. As he walked toward the hotel, he shook his head, and was surprised that the violent movement traveled to his shoulders and spine. He probably looked like an old dog shaking water off his back.

Seaver gave a quiet snort of a laugh at the thought. That was about right. For eleven years, since the day he had gone to work for Pleasure, Inc., he had been moving a third of his salary into accounts in the Caribbean under the name Luther Olmstead. How could men as smart as Buckley, Salateri, and Foley not have guessed that? When they had met him, he had just finished fifteen years as a cop, where there had been no opportunity to put away a dime. Then he had landed a job that paid over two hundred thousand a year with virtually no expenses. The taxes alone would have been more than his old salary.

He would stop in Los Angeles just long enough to pick up traveling money and his passport. That was the main thing—getting out. After that, he would consider what else he wanted to do. The three big guys probably thought that, given his history, his impulse would be to call the police. They would be busy in a few hours getting rid of evidence. But his experience as a policeman had not given him an interest in calling the police. And that was not his only option. He might not know the names of the old men in New York that the three partners were afraid of, but he did know the names of some similar men in Los Angeles, and he just might decide to give them a call. They would appreciate the opportunity to give their friends in New York a timely warning. He had always heard that the Mafia worked on reciprocity and favors, and this was a time of his life when it would not hurt to have them think of him with gratitude.

34

Jane found Earl Bliss’s address in the early afternoon. She drove past it slowly, looking for signs of danger, then continued up the road to study the next few houses. Out here on the northern rim of the San Fernando Valley, the stretches of pavement could hardly be called neighborhoods, because the houses were set at the ends of long winding gravel driveways on weedy parcels that seemed to her to be five acres or more. Some of the places consisted of old, rundown frame houses surrounded by the bodies of half-assembled cars, while others were like Earl Bliss’s, little fenced-in compounds with sprawling suburban houses in the middle. Two miles down the road she turned around and came past the house in the opposite direction. The house remained as she had first seen it: no curtains had moved, no cars had suddenly appeared in the driveway.

She had no evidence of how many people had been engaged in the hunt for Pete Hatcher. Committing murder for money was not a business that lent itself to large teams. But she did know that at least one person was not accounted for: the one who had trapped Hatcher in Denver had been a woman.

Jane did not return until after midnight. She turned off the lights of her rented car, pulled far enough up the drive to keep a passing cop from getting curious, and walked toward the house. The chain-link fence was topped with barbed wire, but there were no insulators for electricity, so she pried off ten feet of it with the tire iron from her rented car, climbed it, and dropped to the lawn.

There was a kennel in the back yard with a pen and a long exercise run, but she knew that the dogs were far past barking, so she skirted close to it and studied the house. It was a five- or six-bedroom one-story ranch structure coated with white stucco. She walked around it, looking for motion sensors, automatic lights, indications of the sort of alarm system it had. There were no security company’s signs anywhere on the property, no stickers on any of the windows. Most of the windows were dark, but she could see two with dim lights glowing behind them. She cautiously approached the first and peered inside. Through the curtain, she could just see a lamp on a desk. She moved to the other side of the window and looked at the place where the cord led to the electrical outlet. She could see the little plastic box and the circular dial. The light was on a timer.

She walked to the other lighted window and saw another lamp on a timer. She considered. The timers meant that nobody was home. There were no signs of an alarm system. It made sense that a professional killer would not want to have his house wired with devices whose sole purpose was to summon the police. And most of the time, the dogs would have warned him long before any intruder came close enough to enter the building where he slept.

She decided to take the chance. Earl and the second man were dead, but there was a strong likelihood that they had left some notes, some information about Pete Hatcher that could give a new set of killers a start. And there was still the woman who had trapped Pete in Denver. The woman might not be the sort who would come after Pete alone, but unless Jane found out who she was, there would be no way to predict anything about her.

Jane walked to the kitchen door, swung her tire iron to shatter the upper pane of glass, reached inside, unlocked the door, and entered. There was no noise, and there was no electrical contact in the frame that could have set off a silent alarm when the door opened.

She felt for the light switch and turned it on. The kitchen was modern and very expensive—a professional-size Wolf stove, Sub-Zero refrigerator, vast surfaces of green marble, the dull gleam of stainless steel—but when she looked in the drawers and cupboards there were few containers or implements to indicate that much cooking went on here.

She walked into the living room. There was electronic equipment, all small modular boxes piled up into towers and banks along one wall. Some of it she recognized—television monitors, VCRs, speakers, compact disc players, cable TV descrambler, tape recorders of various kinds—but among them were other boxes and monitors that seemed to belong to computers. To her it appeared that the man who lived here simply bought things. It occurred to her that each item in this house probably represented some person’s life. People had been changed into leather couches and marble counters and electronic gadgets.

She moved up the hallway and found Earl’s bedroom. Her nostrils picked up the faint scent she remembered smelling when his body had fallen on her, a mixture of sweat and gun oil and some kind of hair tonic. She waited for the wave of nausea it induced to pass, then began her search by the telephone, but she found no paper in the room for writing down numbers or messages.

She opened the sliding door beside her and found a custom-built closet with drawers and racks and hanging clothes. It was the hat rack that caught her eye first. There were a dozen baseball caps with the logos of teams and manufacturers of trucks and farm machinery, but others that said FBI, POLICE, or SWAT TEAM. In a bottom drawer she found two black ski masks with eye and mouth holes and a wide selection of gloves. He didn’t wear those in southern California to keep warm.