Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

He nodded. "Go on."

"Nothing shocks a cop? This would have. When they got too drunk and tired to just keep raping her in some ordinary way, they started trying to think up ways to make her beg them to stop hurting her, because that turned them on." She looked up at him. "What are you thinking? That you don’t want to hear the rest?"

"Will it do her any good?"

"No."

"Where is she now?"

"If I told you I don’t know, you wouldn’t believe me."

"No."

"Then I’ll just say she’s far away."

Coleman leaned on the hood of his car, folded his arms, and stared at her for a moment. "So what are you going to do?"

"I’ve done it. She’s gone."

"About Mr. Killigan. He went up to a strange woman in an airport and attempted to handcuff her and stuff her into a van. You could file a pretty impressive array of charges. Are you going to?"

"There’s no point."

"Are you afraid?"

"No. Rhonda Eckerly isn’t coming back to testify to anything. And Killigan wasn’t attacking an innocent woman minding her own business. I stalked him and trapped him."

He stared at her thoughtfully. "Then there’s still the issue of what to do with you."

"Nothing. I’m going home."

"I didn’t say you could. You just told me you trapped him and beat him up on purpose."

"You can delay me for two or three hours. If you write up a charge, the D.A. won’t file it. I told you I cooked this up myself, so there aren’t any loopholes. He attacked. I resisted. In this state I could have killed him if I wanted."

"You’re pretty sure of that, are you?"

"I have an attorney waiting for me at the station. He can explain it to you if you want. When that’s over, you can drive me back to the airport and put me on my plane."

"What are you, anyway—a detective? A lawyer?"

"A guide."

"Guide? That’s a new one on me."

"Sometimes people need help. I sometimes give it to them."

"Me too."

"I know, and I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I admire you. I would like to shake your hand and go catch an airplane." She grabbed his right hand and gave it a shake, then started to walk out of the parking lot.

Coleman stared at her, but he made no move to stop her. As he watched her walking away, he tried to explain why he was doing it, but there were too many reasons to pick just one. If he wrote down her name, Killigan was the sort of man who would try to find her. And she was right about the legal outcome. No judge in California would let this one come to trial. Finally, he called out to her, "Is this a woman thing?"

She stopped and looked at him. "No. Sometimes the victim is a man. Sometimes the guide is too." She smiled at him. "Or an animal, or just a figment of somebody’s imagination."

2

Jane Whitefield stepped off the airplane in Rochester, New York, wearing a pair of jeans and a dark blue silk blouse with a Japanese-print pattern of trees and flowers on it. She carried the suitcase that Rhonda Eckerly had checked on to her flight in Indianapolis, but there was no longer any resemblance between them.

She carried the suitcase to the car-rental lot and picked up the keys to the car she had reserved during her layover in New York City. Then she drove up South Plymouth Avenue into the city, inside the nest of freeways the local planners had named the Inner Loop, and onto West Main. She turned into the underground parking lot of the Presidential Hotel and let the valet take the car out of sight.

Upstairs in the enormous old lobby, decorated in green-veined marble and dark hardwood, she walked past the reservations desk and the portals that led to bars and restaurants and entered the small shop beside the newsstand. There were four women in chairs already, getting their hair done in a respectful silence. People in hotels were all strangers, and they seemed to talk only to the hairdressers and to watch the mirrors carefully to be sure nothing unauthorized was being done to them. When the slim, dark woman entered, two of the women used the mirrors to glance at her without seeming to, but the manicurist, a plump woman in her fifties, stood up and said, "Mrs. Foley, so nice to see you again."

Jane said, "Hi, Dorothy. Slow day?"

"Too early to tell," she answered. Dorothy was already moving her to her cluttered worktable. She sat down across from her and examined her fingers. "These two are really something," said Dorothy as she carefully pared the nails.

"I broke a couple playing tennis," said Jane.

"And those scratches on your knuckles," said Dorothy. "You should stand farther away from each other when you play."

Jane shrugged to signal that the conversation was over, and Dorothy worked in silence. When she had finished her cutting and filing and buffing and soaking and enameling, Jane followed her to the cash register and handed her a folded bill. The manicurist handed her a small plastic bag.

When Jane Whitefield had walked out of the shop, one of the customers leaned forward in her chair and said to the manicurist, "Was that what I think it was?"

Dorothy turned her business smile on the woman. It was attentive, cheerful, and utterly impenetrable. "Would you like a manicure?"

Jane Whitefield walked out of the lobby and down Main Street for two blocks to the tobacco shop. When she entered, the studious-looking young man with the pipe looked up from the book he was reading and went to turn the knob on the sound system to make Mozart’s Third Horn Concerto recede to a safe distance. "What can I do for you today?" said the young man.

"I’d like a bag of the best grade of pipe tobacco," she said. She held up her hands in a bowl shape. "About this much."

He put his pipe under her nose and waved it back and forth. "What do you think of this?" he said. "I make it for myself. A little Latakia, some prime Virginia, and a little secret I happen to know about."

She dodged the blue-gray smoke and wrinkled her nose. "You cut it with sumac to take the bite out of it?"

The young man looked genuinely injured. "Are you in the business?"

"Just a guess," she said. "I heard you were the best tobacconist in town." This seemed to make up for her knowing.

He led her beyond the glass door into the humidified room, reached to the top shelf, and took down a cannister. He weighed some of his precious mixture and put it into a plastic bag for her. "I hate to part with this stuff," he said. "But for you—" he flipped his wrist to pour another stream of shreds into the bag—"anything. I assume you don’t smoke it yourself, so I guess this isn’t the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

She paid him in cash and put the bag into her purse. "No, I don’t smoke," she said, "but if it’s good I’ll be back."

Jane Whitefield parked her rented car by the curb on Maplewood Avenue and walked up the sidewalk. It was a quiet street full of three-story nineteenth-century houses shaped like plump boxes, built close together near the curb. This part of Rochester had a lot of placid old neighborhoods like this, left from a time when people who had money wanted to live on streets that seemed urban, where a carriage could pull up to the front door and lawns weren’t of much interest because people were only a mile and a generation from the farm. Most of the houses had been partitioned into apartments now, but there were probably fewer people living in them than in the old days, when a family included eight children and two servants. She came to the end of the street and crossed over into the little park.

The grass here was the bright, luminous green that seemed to come in early April and last only until the new blades grew tall in the warm weather. When she stopped to pluck a blade, it was swollen and crisp, and when she split it, her hand was wet with chlorophyll. The trees were old, much older than the houses. They had long ago grown to their full height, and now some of the trunks were four feet in diameter. She could see the buds on the lower branches already, waiting for this part of the earth to tilt a little closer to the sun before they were ready to unfurl into leaves.