Thomas Perry: Dance for the Dead

"Who would want to accomplish that?"

She hesitated, and he could tell she was preparing to be disbelieved. "What I'm telling you is not from personal knowledge. It's what Dennis Morgan told me. This company, Hoffen-Bayne, got to administer a fortune of something like a hundred million dollars. They would get a commission of at least two percent a year, or two million, for that. They also got to invest the money any way they pleased, and that gave them power. There are some fair-sized companies you can control for that kind of investment. As long as Timmy was lost, the trust would continue. You're a judge. You tell me what would happen if Timmy turned up in California."

"The court would - will - appoint a guardian, and probably in this case, a conservator, if you're right about the size of the inheritance."

"That wouldn't be Hoffen-Bayne?"

"We don't appoint business-management companies to raise children, or to audit themselves."

"Then the power and money would be in jeopardy."

"Certainly they would have to at least share the control."

"And they did try to have him declared dead."

"That's a legal convenience. It relieves them of responsibility to search for him, and also protects them if someone were to ask later why they're administering a trust for a client who hasn't been seen for seven years."

"Then it would have been even more convenient if he were really dead. They wouldn't have had to go to court at all."

"Filing a motion is a little different from hiring assassins to hunt down a six-year-old and kill him."

"Maybe. I think filing the motion was a trap. I think Dennis Morgan was poking around, and somebody noticed it. It's not all that hard to find out what you want about people: the trick is to keep them from knowing you're doing it. Dennis was a respected lawyer, but investigating wasn't his field; lawyers hire people to do that. I think they sensed that if a Washington attorney was interested, then Timmy was going to turn up sometime soon."

"And you - all of you - got caught in the trap?"

"Yes." She stood up. "You asked me what I think, so you would know where to begin. I've told you. Dennis couldn't find anybody but Hoffen-Bayne who would benefit from Timmy's death - no competing claims to the money or angry relatives, for instance. Nobody tried to break the will during all the years while Timmy was missing. But I don't know what Dennis got right and what he got wrong, and I can't prove any of it. I only saw the police putting handcuffs on four of the men in the courthouse, and there won't be anything on paper that connects them with Hoffen-Bayne or anybody else. I know I never saw them before, so I can't have been the one they recognized. They saw Timmy." She took a step toward the door. "Keep him safe."

The judge said, "Then there's you." He watched her stop and face him. "Who are you?"

"Jane Whitefield."

"I mean what's your interest in this?"

"Dennis Morgan asked me to keep Timmy alive. I did that. We all did that."

"What are you? A private detective, a bodyguard?"

"I'm a guide."

"What kind of guide?"

"I show people how to go from places where someone is trying to kill them to other places where nobody is."

"What sort of pay do you get for this?"

"Sometimes they give me presents. I declare the presents on my income taxes. There's a line for that."

"Did somebody give you a present for this job?"

"If you fail, there's nobody around to be grateful. My clients are dead." After a second she added, "I don't take money from kids, even rich kids."

"Have you served in your capacity as 'guide' for Dennis Morgan before?"

"Never met him until he called. He was a friend of a friend."

"You - all three of you - went into this knowing that whoever was near this little boy might be murdered."

She looked at him as though she were trying to decide whether he was intelligent or not. Finally, she said, "An innocent little boy is going to die. You're either somebody who will help him or somebody who won't. For the rest of your life you'll be somebody who did help him or somebody who didn't."

The judge stared down at his desk for a few seconds, his face obscured by the deep shadows. When he looked up, his jaw was tight. "You are a criminal. The system hates people like you. It has special teeth designed to grind you up."

As she watched him, she could see his face begin to set like a death mask. He pressed his intercom button. "Tell the officers to come in." He began to write, filling in lines on a form on his desk.

The two police officers swung the door open quickly and walked inside. The man had his right hand resting comfortably on the handle of the club in his belt.

The judge said, "I've finally straightened this out. Her real name is Mahoney. Colleen Anne Mahoney. She was attacked by those suspects on the way into the courthouse. Apparently it was a case of mistaken identity, because she had no connection with the Phillips case. I'm giving you a release order now, and I want all records - prints, photographs, and so on - sealed... no, destroyed. Call me when it's been done." He handed the female officer the paper. "I want to avoid any possibility of reprisals."

"Will do, Judge," said the policewoman. Kramer's instinct about her was confirmed. She had a cute little smile.

The policeman opened the door for Jane Whitefield, but this time nobody touched her. She didn't move. "You should have those teeth checked."

He shrugged. "The system was never meant to rule on every human action. Some things slip through."

She stared at him for a second, then said simply and without irony, "Thank you, Your Honor," turned, and walked out of his office.

2

Jane Whitefield drove her rental car down Fairfax past the high school, the old delicatessens and small grocery stores and the shops that sold single items like luggage or lamps, beyond the big white CBS buildings and then into the hot asphalt parking lot at Farmers' Market, where she found refuge from the Southern California sun in the cool shadow between two tour buses. The market was crowded on Saturdays, and it took her a few minutes of threading her way among the hundreds of preoccupied people to find the pet store. There were two glass enclosures out front where puppies lay sleeping with their smooth little potbellies in the air.

She bought two cubical birdcages that had one side that could be opened for cleaning, and a two-pound bag of bird feed that was peppered with sunflower seeds. She walked across the market to a craft store where people bought kits for making bead jewelry. She drove out of the market and headed northward toward the hills, but then stopped only a few blocks up when she saw a secondhand store that looked as though it might have the right kind of teddy bear. Then she drove the winding road over Laurel Canyon to the San Fernando Valley, and on across the flats to the campus of the California State University at Northridge. She had been past the school once years ago, and carried a picture of it in her mind. It was the right kind of habitat.

Jane had not done this in years, but she was very good at it. She drove around the nearly empty campus until she found a long drive with a row of tall eucalyptus trees beside it and a few acres of model orchard beyond them. She parked her car in the small faculty parking lot behind some kind of science building and carried her cages to the eucalyptus trees. Nearly everyone on campus seemed to be in a library or dormitory, so she had the luxury of silence while she worked.

She propped open the sides of the cages with sticks that had fallen from the trees, took the food cups from their slots on the bars and filled them with bird feed, then ran thin jewelry wire from the cups to the sticks. She balanced a stone on the open wall of each cage so it would come down fast and stay shut. She sprinkled a handful of bird feed over the carpet of fallen eucalyptus leaves in front of the cages, and went for a walk. She used her sense of the geography of university campuses to find the Student Union, and sat at a table in the shade of a big umbrella at the edge of a terrace to drink a cup of lemonade.