Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Carey was at the hospital right now. There were hundreds of phone lines at the hospital. Tapping into all of them would be a job for a team of electrical engineers, not one person who knew how to plant a bug. Jane searched for a way to use the complexity of the place. Carey would be in surgery for the next couple of hours, where an outside telephone call could not reach him. After that, he would be all over the building, walking the halls to examine and discharge patients, read charts and scribble in files, look at X rays and test results. There was no way to predict precisely where he would be. If the operator didn’t have a pretty clear fix on him, what would she do? She would page him.

Jane could not let that happen. The person this woman wanted to find was Jane. The woman could not assume that Jane would not show up in person instead of calling. The woman could monitor her telephone taps with a tape recorder, but she would have to watch Carey with her own eyes.

Suppose Jane didn’t call Carey directly. She could call the nurses’ station in the recovery room. Carey would certainly show up there immediately after surgery, and then again later to clear the patient to be transported to his own room upstairs. But what could Jane say to a nurse? She could hardly ask some stranger to tell Dr. McKinnon he might be in mortal danger because his wife hid fugitives.

For the moment, Carey was as safe as he could be. Nobody could get into an operating room. The big metal doors wouldn’t open unless someone inside hit a switch on the wall. After that, he would be surrounded by people, going about his business as he had been doing for two weeks while this woman had been watching him.

The woman had not come to Buffalo to harm Carey McKinnon. There was no extra pay for that. She had come to watch him and use him to find out where Jane was. Carey was only valuable to this woman if he was alive and unsuspecting. He would be safe until … when? The moment when the woman saw Jane.

She sat strapped in her seat, rigid. Maybe she should not be going home. Maybe the best favor she could do for Carey McKinnon was to stay as far away from him as possible. If she stayed away for long enough, the woman would have to give up and go away. But then Jane realized that she was wrong. If this woman had been keeping Carey in sight for two weeks, then the woman could not be sure that Carey had never caught a glimpse of her, never seen her face. If the woman got tired of waiting, she would not just go away. Before she did, she would put a bullet in Carey’s head.

Linda stared at the red zero on her answering machine. If Earl had done it and gotten back to civilization by now, he should have left a message for her. But maybe he had called home. There was no question that he would call as soon as he could reach a telephone. He would be thinking about what she might be doing to keep Carey McKinnon occupied, and he would want that to end as soon as possible.

She dialed the number of her house. The telephone rang once, twice, and then there was an unfamiliar high-pitched tone. A recorded voice that sounded like a middle-aged woman came on and stated authoritatively, “The number you have reached is not in service. If you think you have reached this number in error, please hang up and dial again.” Linda took her advice.

After the third try, Linda began to feel panicky and worried. Was it possible that in all this traveling she had forgotten to pay a phone bill? Her mind searched for a way to reassure itself, but it came back with nothing. She weighed the danger of calling the long-distance operator in Los Angeles and explaining the problem. She could think of no reason not to, so she did. After a few seconds she was connected with the billing department. The woman on the other end consulted a computer and said, “You’re right. I’m seeing it as out of service. It’s not a billing problem. I’ve already checked your records, and you’re up to date on your payments. But the phone is out of service.”

“Doesn’t whatever you’re looking at say why?” asked Linda. “I’m expecting a very important call, and if they can’t get through I’m going to be a very unhappy customer.”

“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “They don’t tell us what the problem is. It could be a lot of things—a malfunction in the equipment in your home, for instance. Or with the line that goes to your house. If a tree on your property fell and pulled it down, I would have no way of knowing from here.”

“Well, I certainly have no way of knowing from here, do I?” asked Linda.

“I understand that,” said the woman.

“Can’t you send somebody to check?”

“Is there anyone there now to let the repair technician onto the premises?” Linda could tell it was an official question, the sort that brought some rule into play.

“No.”

“Then we wouldn’t be able to send anyone, no.”

Linda closed her eyes and let her voice carry some of the frustration and defeat that she was feeling. “If you were me, what would you do about this?”

Now that the woman had her victory, she issued a reprisal. “When you go out of town it’s a good idea to leave a key with a friend or relative. You might call a neighbor and ask her to look across the street to see if there’s anything obviously the matter.”

The defeat was complete. “Yes, thanks,” she said. “Maybe I’ll try that. Good-bye.” She hung up. Something was very wrong. She goaded her imagination to think of a way to find out what it was from the other end of the continent. She couldn’t call the police and have them check the house, because what they might find would send her and Earl to jail. She and Earl had always been so careful to remain unapproachable and anonymous that she not only had no acquaintances among the people who lived nearby, but she could not now recall any of their names.

She used her laptop computer to call up the Los Angeles telephone directory Northwest section and scanned it. Finally she called the number of a florist a half mile from her house, ordered a dozen roses to be delivered to Linda Thompson from Earl Bliss, and charged it to the Northridge Detectives credit card number she retrieved from the memory of her computer. She made it sound like an afterthought when she asked to talk to the delivery driver. She heard the man turn his head away from the receiver and shout, “Enrique! Phone!”

She explained to Enrique, “These flowers are supposed to be a surprise, so it has to be done in a certain way. It’s a house with a high gate. Drive up to the gate. Ring the bell. If anyone is home, give them the flowers. If nobody is home, there’s a great big mailbox right by the gate. Put the flowers inside, so she finds them when she looks for her mail. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” said Enrique. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” said Linda. “When will you be back from your deliveries?”

“About an hour from now.”

“Fine. I’ll call you, because I need to know where you put the flowers. Okay?”

“Okay.”

A little over an hour later, Linda called again and asked for Enrique. If a line was down, he could hardly have avoided noticing it. If—God forbid—there was a bigger problem, he would have seen something she could interpret. If the time for killing Pete Hatcher had run out and the one waiting in the house was Seaver, or if the house was under police surveillance, somebody would have appeared at the gate to talk to the delivery man. She waited for a minute and a half before Enrique picked up the phone and said, “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t deliver the flowers. The boss says he’ll cancel the order and credit your card for the money.”

“What do you mean, you couldn’t deliver them?”

“There’s nothing there. The lady’s house burned down. You want to find where she’s living now, we’ll be happy to deliver them there.” He paused. “Lady?”