Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

She looked at it without understanding until she opened the box beside it. Inside was a stack of blank gold plastic cards, all bearing the symbols of Visa and MasterCard. The machine was a die for pressing names and numbers into fake credit cards. Her breath caught in her throat. Maybe some of the blanks had the woman’s picture on them. She shuffled through them eagerly, but found no picture. Her eyes passed across the little press. There was still type clamped in the die. She read it backward: Susan Preston Haynes. Of course it was a false name, or the woman wouldn’t have needed to make the credit card at home. Knowing a false name was not going to get Jane any closer to the woman.

She looked around her at the room. The malevolence of the house was strongest here. The perverse eagerness to hurt, to render human beings into money made her sick. She glanced at the computers. Without codes and passwords, they were locked as tightly as the gun cabinet.

Jane sat at the nearest desk and tried to defeat the sick, nervous feeling in her stomach. Her mind had been calmly, logically working its way toward the conclusion that she had to wait as long as it took for this woman to come in the door, and then kill her. It was simple, practical, rational, and utterly wrong. She had just shot two men. But there was an immense difference between shooting back at a killer and crouching in this horrible place with the lights out, waiting for the door to open so she could bring a knife across a person’s throat. She was not going to do it.

She looked around her, and her eyes rested on a small sheet of paper that said Federal Express. It was a receipt, the carbon copy of the mailing label on an overnight package. The date on it was two weeks ago. She picked it up and looked at it closely. The address box said, “Susan Haynes, Meadowgreen Suites, Orchard Park, New York 14127.” Orchard Park was seven or eight miles from Buffalo, no more than fifteen from Amherst.

Jane found herself standing. She had to stop herself from dashing outside and running for the car. She looked around her at the walls that enclosed her. This house seemed as much of a threat as though it were alive. The computers were probably full of information about Hatcher and about Jane, but there were undoubtedly backup disks hidden somewhere else in the building. The building was full of hiding places, locks, and secrets that she could never hope to break. There were probably photographs of Hatcher, and maybe of her too. There might even be electronic equipment that was running right now, taking videotapes of Jane’s visit.

She stepped to the kitchen, where she remembered seeing books of matches with the names of restaurants on them. Then she went outside, sliced off five feet of the garden hose attached to the house, went into the garage and syphoned gasoline out of the tank of the Mercedes into a bucket.

Jane poured the gasoline liberally around the office and on the computers, in the two bedrooms, in the closets. She filled the bucket again, then poured gasoline along the inner walls of the living room, the exercise room, the bathrooms. She poured another bucketful along the baseboards and carpets at the outer walls of each room.

She dribbled a trail of gasoline down the hallway, across the living room rug, and through the kitchen to the back door. She poured gasoline on the kennel and along the walls of the garage. Finally, she poured a stream of gasoline from the kitchen steps to the garage, to the kennel.

Jane climbed back over the chain-link fence, lit a match, and tossed it on the back lawn. The vapor ignited with a poof! and a flash before the match could land, and bright yellow and blue flames raced in three directions. Jane hurried to her car. She saw the bright flare-up when the fire reached the kitchen floor, the flames licking up the kitchen walls.

As she started her car and backed out of the driveway, she saw the quick, purifying flames lighting up one window after another. When she reached the first turn in the road, she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw flames billowing out of the front windows, illuminating the clouds of black smoke that rose into the night sky.

35

Jane stepped into the airline terminal, stopped near the door, and scanned the monitors for the schedule of departures. There seemed to be no flight for hours that stopped in Buffalo, so she chose a nonstop flight to New York City that was leaving in ten minutes. She bought a ticket under the name Julie Sternheim and ran for the gate.

As soon as the plane was in the air and the seatbelt sign above her head went out, she used the Marie Spellagio credit card to activate the telephone built into the seat in front of her and dialed the number of the house in Amherst. She heard the phone ring ten times, and she let it ring five more before she gave up. She glanced at her watch. It was already four A.M. here, so it would be seven in Buffalo. By now, Carey had probably scrubbed and entered the operating room.

If the woman had been in Buffalo for two weeks, she must have gone there straight from Denver—been sent there from Denver. Earl Bliss had been the designated shooter, and he seemed to have had all the money, so probably he had been the one who made the decisions. He must have been smart enough to know that from the moment Pete Hatcher had seen the woman’s face, she had become a liability. So he had sent her to western New York.

As Jane followed the path of logic, she felt her stomach tightening. The woman had not simply been excused from the hunt and sent home: she lived in Los Angeles. She had not been bundled off into hiding in a place that just happened to be near Jane’s hometown. They had sent her something there by overnight mail. People in hiding didn’t need anything urgently enough to require that it be sent in a way that left a record.

Jane tried to invent coincidences that would confute her logic. Had she given Pete any false identities that could have tied him to the western part of New York State? That was impossible. She never sent chasers across her own trail. Did Pete have any close friends or relatives there? When she had asked him about friends and relatives, there had been none east of Nebraska.

The address in Orchard Park might mean something. Orchard Park wasn’t a big, bustling city where people came and went by the thousand without attracting attention. It was a suburb, a small upper-middle-class bedroom community. It wasn’t a place to remain anonymous. It was a place to establish an identity.

This woman could not have been sent to spot Pete Hatcher. She was the only member of the team whose face he had seen. There was only one reason Jane knew of for this woman to be in western New York. That night on the mountaintop, when Earl had been deciding how to kill her, he had called her Jane. The woman must have known much more.

Jane began to sweat. The woman had been there for two weeks. She’d had enough time to find out—what? Where Jane lived, certainly. And that meant she knew who Jane was married to. Jane snatched up the telephone again and inserted her credit card. When she had punched in the area code, she stopped.

Every time Jane had taken Hatcher in a different direction, Earl had turned up with the rifle. Jane’s throat was dry, and her head was throbbing. She had made some terrible mistakes. The woman had probably found her address in a day, and on the next day had broken into the house and bugged the telephones. Jane had obligingly called every few days, and that had somehow given her a location. Now this woman was waiting in Buffalo, probably watching Carey, and Jane could not even call to warn him, because the woman would be listening.

Jane forced herself to be calm and tried to think of another way. She could call Carey’s office. No, that was foolish. If the woman had been listening for a call from Jane, she could not have assumed it would come to the house. The woman would also have tapped the lines in Carey’s office.