Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"Oh, God," he said. "You confiscate it, don’t you? If it’s not real you just take it."

Jane felt sorry for the man; he seemed to be sure he was going to have it taken out of his pay for the next six months. "If you took it to the bank, it’s not your problem anymore," she said gently. "It’s like a hot potato. Nobody gets burned except the one who’s holding it." This seemed to make him feel better. When she could see the blood rising back into his face, she said, "Now, I’ll need a copy of the receipt for what he bought."

"Sure," said the manager, who, looking about fifteen years old now, ran to the back of the store. He returned with a carbon copy of the receipt. Jane took it and slipped it into her file without looking at it. She said, "Now, is there anything he said or did that would help us find him?"

"His car," said the manager. "I helped him carry all this stuff out. It was black. Big—"

"A Ford Bronco?" she asked.

"Yes!" he said, looking astounded. "Big wheels."

"Do you remember any of the license number?"

He looked ashamed. "No. I’m sorry. I didn’t think—"

Jane decided it was time to get out. "I didn’t expect you to," she said kindly. "You’ve both been a big help. Thank you very much." She was already at the door by the time she finished the sentence.

When Jane was back in her car, she took out the receipt and studied it. As she read it, her mind was tracking him: a pair of hiking boots, a sleeping bag, a tent, a fishing rod and reel, lures, a hatchet, a down-filled nylon jacket, a compass. He wasn’t going to a hotel in Saranac or Lake Placid. He was on his way into the mountains.

24

Martin was on his way into the back country, into the vast, empty spaces. The Adirondacks were enormous: almost eleven thousand square miles, some of it public park land, some private property, and dozens of towns. In that space, there were only eleven hundred miles of highways. Once he was off the paved roads, he could be anywhere in the six million acres that the federal government had decreed in 1894 would be "forever wild." She studied the map she had picked up at the hotel gift shop.

He had a fresh car with New York plates on it. He wouldn’t drive any farther east into Vermont or north into Canada over the St. Lawrence River, where he would be a foreigner again. He certainly wasn’t going south, where the country flattened out and the population centers began, and he wasn’t staying in the eastern part of the mountains, where most of the millions of visitors would start arriving as soon as the weather warmed up a little. He would backtrack now, go west on Route 3, the way he had come in, and back through Saranac toward Tupper Lake. From there he could go southwest for eighty miles without ever being closer to a settlement than twenty miles. Looking at the map, she was almost certain of it.

Before she left Lake Placid, she drove to Taylor Ford and spent ten minutes looking at a new Bronco. She paid very close attention to the oversize tires. Then she drove back along Route 3 toward Tupper Lake. There she spent a few hours wandering from one store to another, as she had in Lake Placid. This time she used the photograph she had taken of him instead of the mug shots. He had bought lots of groceries at Winwood’s Grocery Store, but the girl at the checkout counter didn’t remember much about them except that they were the sort of things men bought. Jane wasn’t sure what this meant until she had watched a few men come into the store. There were a lot of preserved foods, not many fresh vegetables or much perishable meat. They were provisions for people who didn’t want to come back to town for a long time.

It was nearly dark when she learned about the canoe. She walked into a boating store that called itself a marina, showed the picture, and the man at the counter recognized him instantly. Martin had been very particular about the canoe. It was fourteen feet long, built to be light "the way the Indians made ’em," with a very shallow draft. He had insisted on lifting the canoe and carrying it around in the parking lot before he would pay for it. That, the man told her, had been a sight, because it had been more canoe than he personally would have been happy carrying any distance on his head, but this guy could handle it and hold a horse under his left arm at the same time. He had set it up on the roof of the Bronco, strapped it down, and then paid cash.

Jane spent the rest of the day selecting her own provisions without returning to any of the stores she had visited. She bought her own canoe at a fancy outdoors-man’s store in Saranac Lake. It was only eight feet long and weighed forty pounds. She bought an axe, a survival knife with fishing gear in the hollow handle, and a backpack at a hardware store in Wawbeek. She bought the rifle in Veterans Camp. When this was done, she had reached her weight limit. There was no way to carry a sleeping bag or tent, so she picked up a light nylon tarp. That afternoon when she went back to her room in Saranac Lake, she opened the prison file again.

She read through the file searching for any piece of information that might help. She studied his medical records closely. There were no allergies, no old injuries that had left him with a weakness, no medicines he had to take, no deficiencies in his vision or hearing that would give her an edge. Ron the gravedigger had said something about his having killed another prisoner in Marion, but if it was true, there was nothing in his record about the fruitless investigation that must have followed, so she had no indication of how he had chosen to do it.

She turned to the report of his final arrest. He had been working when they had spotted him in the surveillance of Jerry Cappadocia, so maybe the report would give her a sense of how he behaved when he was planning to kill somebody. The place of the surveillance was 9949 Madison Street. He had been picked up outside a building called Dennaway’s. What was that? It sounded like a bar, or maybe a restaurant. She picked up the telephone and called long-distance information, then dialed the number they gave her.

"Dennaway’s," said a female voice.

"Hello," said Jane, forcing her voice into the cheerful, businesslike tone she had learned years before when she worked as a skip-tracer. "I’m calling from the Better Business Bureau, and I find we have a blank in our descriptive listing for Dennaway’s. Can you help?"

The woman hesitated. "Well, we have a little of everything, from Versace to Donna Karan."

It was a women’s clothing store. Martin had been planning to kill Jerry Cappadocia at a women’s clothing store. "I’m just drawing from memory here," said Jane, "but didn’t you have a men’s department at one time?"

"No, we’ve always been exclusively a ladies’ couturier."

Jerry Cappadocia must have been shopping for the girl, buying her presents. What was her name? Lenore Sanders. "I’ll make sure that we get it right. Thank you for your help."

"It’s a pleasure," crooned the woman. "Is there anything else I can tell you?"

Jane decided there was no reason not to push it as far as she could. Any bit of information she could change from a speculation into a fact was worth having. She made her voice go soft and confidential. ’’Well, if you’re not too busy, maybe we can clear this up right now. Do you have a regular customer named Lenore Sanders?" Unless Jerry Cappadocia was stupid, he would have tried to buy Lenore the clothes she might have chosen. He would go to the stores where she shopped.

"Let me look in the computer," said the woman. Jane didn’t feel hopeful. Five years was a long time. But after some audible clicking of keys and a pause, the woman said, "Oh, here she is. But I can’t imagine why she’d be writing to the Better Business Bureau about us. She hasn’t bought anything here lately."