Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

At first she had been most afraid of permanence. There was some instinct that told her it didn't matter if they gave her a sensation that made her scream, not because having it happen so many times had made her used to it but because it left something. It was like dividing her in half. Each time they did it, half of her was gone. Then they would divide the half, and she would be smaller, but no matter how many times they hurt her, some tiny fraction of her would be left. Even if all that was left at the end was the size of a germ, someday it might grow back. But if they blinded her or crippled her, her eyes or legs would not grow back. She had a deep animal urge to keep her body intact.

But even this feeling was faded now. She had gone from fear to despair. She could not force herself to imagine a future. The past was all lies, arrogance, and deception, and she could not think about her life as separate events now. Even Mary Perkins was more filth she had made up and smeared on herself. She was Lily Smith, and she was sorry.

Sometime after the little window high on the wall in the bathroom turned dark again, a man she had never seen before walked in carrying a briefcase. He was older and had gray, bristly hair. He wore a gray suit with a coat that seemed a little too tight in the shoulders, and a pair of shoes that looked as though he polished them a lot. She thought of him as Policeman. He brought with him a straight-backed chair that appeared to be part of a dining room set and sat down on it.

He watched her with eyes that looked serious and alert, but there didn't seem to be anything else behind them. He had no predatory gleam, no cold contempt. He was simply waiting. She wanted to please him, to deal with this new person and win him over to her side.

She began slowly and logically because she had failed so miserably with Barraclough, and this one seemed even more touchy, more likely to dismiss her and go away. "I would like to rind a way to make this end." She tried to sound ingratiating, but her voice came out toneless and monotonous.

He pursed his lips and nodded, as though he were giving her permission to go on. "I know."

She ventured a little further. "Nobody has asked me any questions."

He shrugged. "There's no hurry."

This was like a weight tied to her. "Why?"

He said, "We destroyed the tapes you made of the meeting on the freeway - "

"I didn't do that," she interrupted.

He raised an eyebrow as a warning. She winced, forcing herself to keep silent. That was how she had earned Barraclough's contempt, and if she did it to this one, her last chance would be gone. They both knew she was an accessory to the crime, so she accepted it.

He said, "Your girlfriend Jane wrote you off. She turned up yesterday at the L.A. airport. Operatives followed her to Chicago." He opened his briefcase and lifted out a big plastic food-storage bag with a seal on the top like the ones they used for evidence. Inside was a long shock of shiny black hair. He placed it back in the briefcase. "It seems to me that there's nobody else who even knows that you're missing. You've been traveling under false names for some time."

She had not realized until now that she had been living on the assumption that Jane was alive. If she was gone, then Policeman was right. Enduring a day or a year made no difference because nobody in the world knew she was gone. There was no possibility that she could ever leave this room. She repeated, "Is there any way that I can end this?"

Policeman looked at her judiciously. "It all depends on you."

A tiny hope began to return. It was from a different source this time, and it seemed more genuine than imagining that Jane could convince the authorities to break down the door to save her. Now that Jane was gone, she could see how foolish she had been to think of it at all. She said, "What do I do?"

He said, "Let's talk."

"All right."

"Tell me what happened the day you left the Los Angeles County Jail."

"I took a bus to the airport. Then I saw Jane."

"What color was the bus?" He asked her questions without appearing to listen to the content of the answers, just watching to see if she was lying.

"What name did you use in Ann Arbor?"

"Donna Kester. Jane picked it. She had cards and things in that name."

"Where did you go when you left there?"

"Let's see. Ohio. We hitched a ride with a student to Columbus, then Cleveland. The Copa Motel."

"Did you pay cash?"

"No. Credit cards. She had lots of credit cards, all in different names."

"What name did she use at the Copa?"

"I'm not sure. I think it was Catherine Snowdon." She told him the addresses of the hotels and motels, the agencies where they had rented cars, the routes they had driven - everything that came out of her memory. She wanted to please him. He seemed to be rooting for her, hoping she would pass. He wrote nothing down, but he seemed to be listening for mistakes. Each time a detail struck his ear as wrong, he would interrupt.

"How did you get into a women's dormitory at night? They're locked." It would always be something irrelevant, but it would be like a slap because it made her remember something else to prove she was giving him everything.

Finally, when the questions didn't bring any new answers, he stood up and took a step toward the door.

"Wait," she said. "Don't go. I've done everything, given you everything. What do you expect me to do?"

Policeman opened his briefcase again, pulled out a blank piece of paper, took a black felt-tipped pen out of his shirt pocket, closed the briefcase, and set the pen and paper on the chair. Then he walked to the shower, unlocked the handcuff from her wrist, turned, and walked out the door. She heard him locking it behind him.

She could not believe her good fortune. She stepped unsteadily to the chair. She started by printing the names as neatly as she could: Bahamas Commonwealth Bank; Union Bank of Switzerland; Banco de America Central of the Cayman Islands; International Credit Bank of Switzerland. The names themselves brought back the numbers, clear and fresh and clean in her mind, because numbers always were.

When she was finished, she left the pen and the paper on the seat of the chair and went back to her shower stall. After a long time. Policeman came through the door, picked up the chair and the piece of paper, and walked out the door.

It took them a few hours to do whatever they had needed to do to verify that the accounts existed. Then Policeman came in with Barraclough. This time Barraclough carried the papers. They were bank-transfer authorizations. Across the top was the name of one of her banks and the account number. Across the bottom of each one was the account where all of the money was going: Credit Suisse 08950569237. Her hatred clutched the numbers to her and clung to them as though they were the eyeballs of the men in the house.

When she was finished signing the papers they took them and walked out of the room without speaking to her. She had a strange sense of relief now. Her body felt light, as though she could dance or just rise up into the air. She held the numbers in her head and played with them like colored billiard balls that clicked when she moved them. Oh, eight ninety-five, oh, five sixty-nine, two thirty-seven. No fours or ones. First letters, O-E-N-F-O-F-S-N-T-T-S. 08950569237.

Jane sat in the dark and studied the gravel drive beside the house. There were the white station wagon, a white van, and a dark gray Dodge that looked like the same model as the red one they had used to bring Timmy to the freeway meeting. The small white house looked as though it had once been a real farmhouse where a family had lived and worked the broad flat fields around it, probably back in the thirties.

Jane knew she was going to have to do everything as quickly as she could. In an hour or two the sun would be up and one of them would look out a window. She had left the car a mile away by the side of the road, so there was no chance of using it as a blind.