Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

She stepped to the rack of hanging clothes and confirmed the impression that had been building in her mind. There were clothes of all kinds—conservative suits and moth-eaten wool hunting shirts, a tuxedo beside an army field jacket that was in a plastic bag because it was covered with dirt. Earl had uniforms. There were the midnight-blue shirt and pants of the Los Angeles Police Department beside the hot-weather version with short sleeves, a khaki Highway Patrol uniform, a blue windbreaker with the word POLICE in bold reflective letters like the ones plainclothes cops slipped on for raids. There were work clothes for the Department of Water and Power, Southern California Gas, Pacific Bell. Earl had been able to impersonate virtually anyone.

She left the bedroom and went up the hall to see what Earl had kept in the other rooms. She reached the door on the end, turned on the light, and drew in a breath.

It was a woman’s bedroom. Earl had not lived in the house alone. It was inconceivable that a man like Earl would have one woman who lived in a house with his collection of police uniforms but asked no questions and a second who went out with him to kill people. This was almost certainly the woman who had ambushed Pete Hatcher in Denver. Jane opened the nearest closet. The clothes on the hangers were like everything else in the house: they bore very expensive labels without being especially appealing or tasteful choices, and all of them seemed too recent. There was such a profusion of new clothes that Jane wondered how anybody could spend so much time shopping. She tried to focus her mind on the immediate need to use her time efficiently. If the woman lived here, then there was a strong possibility that she could show up without warning. She had been in Denver, but Jane had seen no sign of a woman in Montana.

Jane spent ten minutes searching for framed photographs, albums, anything that might tell her what the woman looked like, but she found nothing. She looked more closely at the clothes in the hope that they would help her form an image of the woman’s size and shape, but it was a pointless exercise. It seemed to Jane that every woman she had seen in California was a size eight, between five feet six and five feet eight.

She kept searching. The woman was vain and a bit self-indulgent. The room beside this one was a dressing room with a huge lighted mirror. The cosmetics, creams, perfumes, and oils in tiny jars and bottles were all brands so expensive that most women would not have recognized them.

She went into the bathroom connected with the bedroom and found it to be the same. There was a glass shower with marble walls that would have held five people and complicated fixtures for spraying water at different intensities and different angles. There was a sunken bathtub with Jacuzzi jets, a steam machine for facials, and here, too, the same profusion of unguents and lotions and oils, enough to last several lifetimes.

The door on the far side of the bathroom opened into the exercise room. There was a stationary bike, a treadmill, a Nautilus machine, weights, padded benches, step-stairs, pulley contraptions. The whole inner wall was one immense mirror with a ballet barre. Jane tried to understand this woman. The size of her clothes indicated that she took care of herself, but the equipment in this room was not of the quality or variety that most people put in their homes. It was all the industrial-grade gear that gyms bought. She lifted the bar of the exercise machine. If the setting was for the woman, then she was a specimen, Jane thought. Maybe Earl had used the equipment too. Through the French door on the outer wall, Jane could see a thin strip of moonlight on water—a pool, too, right at the woman’s doorstep. But it wasn’t the pretty kind, or the sort where people had fun swimming together. It was a single-lane lap pool. It reminded Jane of the dogs’ exercise run by the kennel.

Jane moved back into the woman’s bedroom. The whole house made her uncomfortable, vaguely afraid. She was fascinated and repelled by the mundane details, the fixtures of the man and woman’s daily life here. She could not get herself to set aside the thought that each extravagance looked like a single spree, as though one day they must have come home from killing someone and used the money to buy a room full of exercise equipment. Another day they would come home and hire a contractor to remodel the woman’s bedroom. She wondered if they thought about the people afterward: this room was cutting John Smith’s throat, and this one was shooting Bob and Betty Johnson through their heads in their sleep.

She looked around her at the place where the woman slept. The woman dressed as other women did, and liked the amenities that other women liked, but there was too much of everything, and it all seemed a little bit off. It seemed to Jane that it was like the room of a man impersonating a woman: transvestites never seemed to wear an oversized sweatshirt and blue jeans. She remembered the weights in the exercise room: maybe she had stumbled on the truth. She took a pair of slacks out of the closet and measured the ratio of the hips to the waist. No, the clothes would not have fit on a body that had not been born female.

But everything in the house was wrong. The kitchen was not a place where anything was cooked. It was a hoard of appliances and glossy surfaces. The living room looked as though no one ever sat in it. The furniture was all too well matched to have been bought any way but at once, and it was spatially arranged to be neither attractive nor comfortable, just placed so that there would be room for a lot of it. She looked at the bed. It was king-sized, too big for one person, but she could not imagine the people who had lived here doing anything so human and comprehensible as sleeping on it together.

Jane opened the second closet and found the boxes of wigs. The woman had good ones, all genuine human hair. There were short ones, falls to take on and off, curly ones and straight ones. Jane took a quick inventory. The woman had light brown, dark brown, red, black, auburn, even gray. The only kind missing was blond.

Jane pushed aside some clothes and saw the door of a gun cabinet. It was built like a safe, with a five-digit combination lock. There was no hope of looking inside, but Jane decided that she had seen enough of Earl’s arsenal already: what she wanted would be on paper. But the gun cabinet struck her as part of the impersonation. The room was so aggressively, insistently feminine, so exclusively the domain of a woman, that it was a perfect place for a cache of weapons.

She still had rooms to account for. She closed the closet and left the bedroom, then walked down the hall into an office. It had two desks, two telephones, two computers. There were no photographs here, either.

The filing cabinets were full of records of payments—some made by Earl Bliss, some made by Northridge Detectives—but no records of receipts, no notations relating to income, no lists of clients. Whatever useful information existed, it was probably in the computers. She searched the desk drawers. At first she found only office supplies, but the deep one on the right side of the second desk was full of electronic gear. There was a box of tiny short-range audio transmitters for hiding inside household objects, more powerful ones with prongs for plugging into wall sockets, even one that had been disguised as a night-light for a child’s room. There were receivers and long-range microphones. She closed the drawer.

The place had once been a bedroom, so there was a closet here, too. She opened it, and the sight made her shiver. There was a handyman’s pegboard. On it hung handcuffs like the police used, thumbcuffs with jagged inner edges that could do terrible damage if a prisoner struggled, a two-foot coil of piano wire with handles on both ends, a couple of long spikes like skewers. She lifted a small box from the shelf and took off the top. There were hypodermic needles and bottles. She read the labels and she could see they had been stolen from a hospital: anectine for stopping the heart, insulin for inducing shock, heroin for an overdose the L.A. coroner would find familiar and explicable. She put the box back and found the little press.