Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

She set these sheets aside on the bed and pushed back farther in the file to the older entries. There was a summary of his record, provided at his entrance so that the prison officials would know whom they were dealing with. Five arrests, beginning at age eighteen, which could mean there had been more while he was a minor. Aggravated assault in Chicago; charges dropped twice. Manslaughter in Chicago; charges dropped. Suspicion of murder in St. Louis; released for lack of evidence.

Her eye caught something that made her stop because she wondered if she had imagined it. She went back and looked at it: arresting officer, John Felker. That was how he had known what to call himself. Martin had probably thought a lot about the man who had arrested him that time. He had known when the real Felker had retired from the police force, even learned his real Social Security number. This must have been the arrest that had made Martin seem important enough to watch, because the next arrest was the final one, for an illegal concealed weapon, something a cop wouldn’t know about unless he searched him. As Ron the gravedigger had said, it was something he probably would have gotten six months for unless the judge knew a lot about him and knew he had to swing hard because this was the last chance before somebody else died.

The Social Security number worried her. Martin probably hadn’t obtained it just to fool her. He might have gotten it because, of all the codes and serial numbers that a person collected in his life, it was the best one to have if you wanted to find him. It never changed, and it got attached to other things: credit cards, bank accounts, licenses. She wondered whether she should try to call the real John Felker to warn him. She looked at the telephone on the nightstand beside the bed, but she didn’t reach for it. She decided to wait. Martin might have learned what he could about Felker in order to harm him, but he wouldn’t be able to devote himself to that right now.

She moved to the back of the file. Born April 23. It gave her a special kind of twinge that she knew she wasn’t supposed to be feeling. They had been together on the Grand River reservation on his birthday. Somehow that made it more horrible, increasing the distance he had placed between them. She was ashamed of feeling that way, still. It was one thing to be surprised if somebody hit you in the dark; it was another to keep feeling surprised, over and over, as the blows kept coming.

Then she noticed his place of birth. Why had she assumed it would be St. Louis? She recognized that the trouble came from her clinging unconsciously to a wish that at least something he had said to her be true. She wanted to detect some point where he had wavered, maybe forgotten himself and actually talked to her without calculation. She wanted to believe that they had been, if only for one minute, nothing but a man and a woman lying in the dark, telling each other things. Everything he knew about St. Louis he had probably learned while earning that suspicion-of-murder arrest. The place of birth was, somehow, even worse than the birthday. He was from Lake Placid, New York.

She stood up and walked all the way to the door and then back to the wall, over and over as she explored the stinging sensation. Not only was everything he had said a lie, but he must have been listening to what she said and secretly thinking she was stupid, making her tell him where they were now and where they were going, and listening always without wanting to hear what she was saying but, instead, to be sure that she was still fooled. He had asked questions, made her talk about what she felt and about her family and her people, not because he was even morbidly curious, but because everyone knew that the best way to lie to someone was to make her do the talking.

She pushed aside the memories of Felker and forced herself to think about Martin. He had killed Harry over a week ago. He had just gotten out of prison after eight years, so any friends he might have had would not have been the sort he could trust. If he had gone to any of them, Cappadocia’s men would have seen it because they were following him. He could not have prepared an escape to the Caribbean or somewhere while he was sitting in a cell. It took papers even he couldn’t have collected in there without having somebody find out. What had he done? He had gotten out of jail and collected the money. Was that the whole payment in advance or just earnest money? It didn’t matter, because he was too cunning to expect that he could kill Harry and then go back to Chicago for the rest. Nobody could be certain if Harry ever knew who had killed Jerry C., but if John had gotten a pile of money from them, then he knew. He would be smart enough to see that once he killed Harry, he would be taking Harry’s place. Not Chicago, then. The partial payment was all he could expect to make on the deal.

She corrected herself. Even that was a wrong assumption. He had let her see money, and she was assuming that he had shown her all of it. All she could be sure of was that he would not go anywhere that she could figure out, in order to get more.

She walked to the window and stared out at the lights along the San Diego Freeway far below her. He wasn’t infallible. He had gotten caught a few times. She went back to the bed and studied the arrest summary again. Stopped for questioning by a surveillance team. Okay, you watch, then you arrest. So what? Maybe this meant something to the cops who were supposed to read it that it didn’t mean to her. But farther down the page was the reason the surveillance had been mentioned. He had been arrested in the company of Jerry Cappadocia. He hadn’t been under surveillance at all. Jerry Cappadocia had been. John ... James Michael Martin had been just a bodyguard or something. That was in the file to show what kind of connections he had. They didn’t want the judge to think he was just some ordinary jerk. He was a special jerk, with organized-crime buddies.

Jane stared across the room at the window and listened to a big plane rumbling down the runway. No, the story didn’t make sense. Cappadocia’s friends had been, even now, looking for Harry to make him talk, and to do that, they had to keep him alive as long as that kind of conversation took. But John Felker-slash-James Martin had been looking for him to kill him. And the guys in the grave, who worked for the Cappadocia family, didn’t talk about James Martin as a member of the team. He was just a guy you hired to kill people.

Then the thin surface she had been walking on, the one that assumed anything anybody said was true unless it was disproven, seemed to give way. She was suddenly on the other side of it in her mind, looking at it in reverse.

The police had assumed Martin was some kind of employee of Jerry Cappadocia. Certainly, he had known him. But there was more than one reason to be near Jerry Cappadocia with a gun.

It was like reversing a puzzle piece; suddenly, it fit. If Jerry Cappadocia had been in danger, he might hire a killer like Martin to protect him. If he did, was that all he would do? No. He would carry a gun too, or he would have some of his own people do it for him. The surveillance was on Jerry Cappadocia, so he was the one the police wanted, but they didn’t find a way to arrest him or any of his men, which meant that none of them was armed. Jerry Cappadocia hadn’t been in danger that night. Or he hadn’t thought he was. But maybe the one thing that had kept him alive was the police surveillance. Even though he must have seen Martin searched and the gun pulled out of his belt or pantleg or somewhere, Jerry still would not have suspected. To him, it must have been like watching the police discover that his dentist owned drill.

For the first time after all these years, she understood Harry. He had always claimed he had never seen anything at the poker game the night Jerry Cappadocia was murdered. But he had run anyway. He seemed to think nobody would ever believe he hadn’t seen anything, and maybe nobody would have. But that wasn’t the reason he had run. He had run because he had seen something and couldn’t tell anybody. And the only thing that made sense, that fit his sucker personality, was if what he saw convinced him that the one who had ordered the killing was his friend, the man who had kept him alive in prison.