Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

"You know what will happen when I have her?"

"You'll end up with her money. I also know that if you have her. she's not coming back to ask me how it happened."

Barraclough stared at Mary for a moment, then turned and walked away into the rest of the house, the part where people who were free could walk.

Mary tried to laugh. She wanted Barraclough to hear her laugh, but it was so low and empty that he couldn't have heard it. She knew why he had played the tape. She was supposed to think that Jane had really been selling her. But how could he expect her to believe that? She had been in on the plan from the beginning.

But then she thought about what she had heard, and she knew. He was playing it to let her know that Jane had caught him on tape, and that she had thrown the evidence away. She was so stupid that she had forgotten to leave the tapes in the car when she had gone to him. She had forgotten there were any tapes. He would have been caught and convicted of her kidnapping, rape, and murder except for her unbelievably stupid mistake. She felt burning humiliation and shame. She was going to die a horrible, slow, degrading, painful death and the last thing she would remember was that she had let her killer go free.

It was another hour before she moved beyond herself and thought about Jane. "Mary Perkins isn't the sort of person I want to risk my life for.... I gave her a chance and she disappointed me." The reason Jane sounded so convincing on the tape was that she was telling the truth. Mary knew how to lie, and she had lied the same way. "She's not worth it." Even Barraclough, who caught liars for a living, was fooled because the words were literally true. Then the last part came back to her. "I know if you have her she isn't coming back..." That was true too. She was here, chained, injured, and hungry, and it was going to go on and on until she was dead.

For the next six hours Mary tried to work out a way to kill herself. The shower door had been taken out, and they had been too smart to leave the hinges. She experimented with the handcuff to see if there was a way she could get the chain across her throat to hang from the shower head, but the effort hurt her wrist terribly and there was no way to bring any pressure on her windpipe. At some point they would have to feed her, and there would be something - a glass, a knife, or even a china plate - that she could use to slash and stab herself.

But in the end she realized that she was not going to do it. If she killed herself, she would leave the hard, cold, perfect nugget of hatred inside her dead body, stranded like a virus. She had to stay alive to use it.

25

Jane waited until she was positive that Farrell was asleep, drove the mile back to the gas station to fill the tank of her own car, and returned to the motel. She was so exhausted that she was afraid she would doze off and wake up hours later to find Farrell's station wagon gone. She walked close to his car and looked in the windows. For a moment she considered hiding in the cargo section in the back and letting him drive her to Mary, but dismissed the idea. He would have a gun, and she would probably wake up about the time he flipped off the safety to fire it into her head.

Then she saw something lying on the dashboard, a yellow, crumpled piece of paper. She moved closer and recognized that it was a receipt from an American Express card. It was so wrinkled that she could barely read the machine printing on it. She took her pen and a receipt from her purse and wrote down the information - the name David R. King, the expiration date, and the thirteen-digit number - then walked to the pay telephone at the convenience store across the street.

She looked at the back of Catherine Snowdon's American Express card and dialed the number printed on it.

"Customer Service," said the voice. "May I help you?"

Jane said, "Yes. I'm afraid I have a problem and I guess you can tell me what to do. My husband's wallet has been lost, and his American Express card was in it."

"Account number?"

Jane read it off her receipt.

"Expiration date?"

"Next August. He's in the hospital. There was an accident and they brought him in, and his wallet somehow disappeared. I don't know if - "

"I understand," said the woman gently. "We'd better not take a chance. I'm going to cancel the card as of now. He'll be receiving a new one in the mail in a couple of days with a new number."

"But what happens if somebody else has it?"

"That's all explained in detail on the back of your statement. Basically you have nothing to worry about. You did the right thing by calling. Thank you very much. I hope your husband recovers quickly."

"Thank you," said Jane. She took some time walking back to the motel, formulating the details of her story.

She opened the office door with an air of authority and looked around. It was a bright morning already, but the young man behind the desk looked as exhausted as she felt. The hair on the back of his head was standing out in tufts from lying back in his chair while he watched a dreadful dubbed movie on the small television set beside him. At the moment several muscular men in fur kilts were swinging clumsily at each other with swords and taking a terrible toll on the columns of the Parthenon. He stood up and leaned his elbows on the counter. "May I help you?"

"I'm Kit Snowdon," Jane said. "American Express Fraud Division. I'm afraid we've got a little problem."

The young man switched off the swordsmen behind him and looked as though he were glad she had come along. "How can I help?"

"You have a gentleman staying in Room 4 who is in possession of a stolen American Express card. He would be registered under the name David R. King."

The young man was shocked. "But I ran his card on the machine. There's got to be some mistake."

"Run the numbers again." She allowed her voice to betray a tiny portion of the impatience she was feeling.

He picked the receipt out of the drawer, pushed a few buttons to get onto the phone line, then punched the numbers in. After a few seconds the machine rattled off a message from the central computers in North Dakota or someplace. He looked sick. "They want me to confiscate the card."

"The computer always says that. We haven't had a computer beat up yet," she said. "Ignore it."

"But - "

"If you ran the card before, you must have gotten a look at him. Did he look like somebody you want to take a card from?"

"No." He shook his head solemnly, then looked at the telephone on the counter. "Should I call the police?"

Jane sighed wearily. "I'll lay it out for you. He's been traveling for two days. He has two other cards and he's got some charges - maybe fifteen hundred by now. If I apprehend him, he gets charged with petty larceny. If I can get him without making a legal mistake and if the company lawyers follow through, he gets ninety days - tops. If I follow him another day or two and he gets the bill up over three thousand, then it's grand theft, forgery, maybe possession of stolen property, and the judge gets to swing hard. In fact, he has to."

"What do we do?"

"I've been following him for two days," said Jane. "I'm asleep on my feet. I want you to check me into a room and watch his door while I get some sleep. The minute you know he's awake, ring my room."

"What if he checks out? Should I slow him down?"

"Don't do anything you wouldn't normally do, except this time buzz my room. That's all." She handed him the Catherine Snowdon credit card.

The kid slid it across the slot of his machine and handed it back to her with the key. "I'm sorry I messed up with the authorization. I was positive - "

"You didn't mess up," said Jane. "He altered the magnetic strip to change one digit, or the machine would have said 'Tilt.' The real pros know how to do that. Just be sure he doesn't slip away. If you go off duty, make sure the next guy knows what to do."