Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

“Why not? It was self-defense.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “This is a time when we don’t have the right kinds of answers for the questions they would ask. This woman was a professional killer. If the gun has ever been registered, it wasn’t to her. And if we get our names and pictures in the newspaper, there will be other people coming—ones who knew her, maybe others who have been looking for me.”

“Then who are you calling?”

“Nobody.” She watched his eyes. They looked as though they were gazing into the emptiness for the first time: there was nobody to call, no agency or institution that could do anything now but hurt them, no friend they could burden with this knowledge, because the risk it carried was too great. Jane said, “Here’s what you do. Go right back to the hospital. Check on your patients again, haunt the nurses’ stations, read charts, write notes. Act as though you had never left. Don’t come back until after ten.”

He shook his head in amazement. “You think I can leave you here alone?”

Jane stood and walked toward him. “Neither of us wanted this, but here we are. We’re in trouble. I know the way out, and you don’t.” She pushed him toward the doorway, hard. “So go. We have to use every second.”

He stopped, took a last look at her, then turned and walked down the hallway toward the stairs.

At ten thirty, Carey McKinnon unlocked his front door and stepped into his house. He called, “Jane?” but there was no answer. He discovered that he did not want to raise his voice and try again. It took an extreme act of will to ascend the stairs and enter the bedroom. For a moment it seemed as though he had lost his senses. There was no corpse, no blood. The bed had been made with crisp new sheets and blankets. The floor had been scrubbed. It was as though nothing had happened.

Gradually, he began to sense that he was not alone. He whirled and saw Jane standing in the doorway. She was wearing a blue dress with a flower print that he had always liked, but which she hardly ever wore. At her feet was a small leather overnight bag. She said, “Come on. We’re not sleeping in that room tonight. You’re going to take me to a hotel.”

He waited. “That’s all you’re going to say about it?”

She shrugged, picked up the overnight bag, and handed it to him. “I’ll just say it’s the last thing you’ll hear from me tonight that includes an order, or the word ‘no.’ ” She turned and walked down the hallway of the old house toward the stairs.

“What about tomorrow?”

He could hear the smile returning to her voice as she said over her shoulder, “Ask me tomorrow.”

37

The radiance of the sun just rising behind the horizon outside the east windows made entering the big conference room at dawn feel like walking into a dream. The light was beautiful, golden. In a few minutes it would shine through the broad, moist leaves of the jungle plants outside the glass with such intensity that the droplets left over from the three-thirty watering would evaporate in minutes. But the sky to the west was still that deep purple-blue of the desert night that made the colors of the Las Vegas lights glow brighter, like millions of flares burning at once.

Max Foley looked around the room and verified with mild satisfaction that he was the first to arrive. He supposed it wasn’t surprising. The complexity of Buckley’s mind seemed to Foley to have been built up like a muscle by a lifetime of worrying about eighty things at once. He had probably spent much of the night getting up over and over to see if any news had come in. Salateri had probably spent most of his night screaming into his telephone to find out why it hadn’t. All three partners had been living in their suites upstairs for two months, and it was starting to feel like a siege.

Foley walked to the private bathroom at the far end of the room and knocked, then opened the door with his key. He glanced at the key, as he often did, before he put it back in his pocket. There were only three copies of that key. He had seen them listed once on the roster for the hotel complex: Universal Grand Masters. They were the keys to the kingdom. They would open any lock that any other key in the hotel would open, and a few more besides. “We three kings of Orient-Tar,” as his kids used to say. That was—what? Two marriages back, before he had become rich enough to make giving away half his visible assets too steep a price for getting laid now and then. Foley stared in the mirror at his shave, combed his hair, and went back out into the conference room, then looked at his watch. It was after five o’clock, and he was getting impatient.

Foley walked to the end of the vast conference table and sat down in his chair. He glanced at the three identical piles of newspapers that had been left here for the partners and picked up the paper on the top of this morning’s pile. It was the Idaho Statesman . He thumbed down the pile, reading the mastheads: Salt Lake Tribune, Denver Post , Spokane Spokesman-Review . It looked as though the staff had just bought every paper within a thousand miles of Kalispell. He returned to the top and spotted the words in the lead article that had been circled.

“Montana State Police confirmed that Calvin Seaver, the Nevada man held for questioning in the shooting, has been ruled out as a suspect and released.”

The muscles in Foley’s shoulders and elbows locked. He let the newspaper drop from his hands as he tried to reconcile what he had read with what he knew. Foley and his partners had sent Seaver out to find Hatcher and kill him. A man had been shot. Seaver had been caught a few miles away with the murder weapon in his motel room, powder residue on him, and false identity papers. Foley had always acknowledged that there was some remote possibility that Seaver might not be convicted of the murder—there could be warrant problems or something—but the notion that he would be released had never entered Foley’s mind.

Foley’s eyes fell on the pile of newspapers in front of Buckley’s seat. He leaned forward and lowered his head to be certain. Yes, if he looked at it from the side, he could see an indentation in the shape of a circle. Buckley had set his coffee cup on the newspaper. Buckley had been here and gone.

Foley studied Salateri’s pile of newspapers, but they seemed to be untouched. He swung his chair around, picked up the telephone, dialed Salateri’s suite, and let the phone ring fifteen times.

He walked out of the room to the partners’ private elevator and used his Universal Grand Master key to activate it, then rode it back up to the thirtieth floor. He rapped on Salateri’s door, then kept knocking until his knuckles were sore and the knocks grew fainter. He took out his key and unlocked the door.

Foley pushed the door open, stepped into the big living room, and surveyed the rest of the suite through doors left ajar. Drawers had been yanked out of the built-in dressers to be dumped into suitcases, then thrown on the floor. Salateri had not even bothered to close the floor safe and push the antique Persian rug over it after it was empty.

Foley went out, locked the door, and walked along the hallway and up the fire stairs to Buckley’s suite. He unlocked Buckley’s door and took in a sharp breath. The place looked untouched. Maybe Buckley was asleep in one of the bedrooms. Foley stepped in, closed the door behind him, and took two steps toward the master bedroom before he noticed the painting over the sideboard. The Matisse on the wall had been replaced by a reproduction of a Watteau. Foley spun around to look at the lighted glass display case on the wall behind him. The spot that Buckley had designed as a shrine for his Fabergé egg was now occupied by a small black-and-orange urn that had curly-headed Greek wrestlers squaring off along the sides. To Foley it looked about as real as the ones in museums, but he knew better. It was a cheap fake, and Buckley was gone.