Dance for the Dead (21 page)

Jane took her time and looked
closely at the houses. Few of them showed any interior lights at this
hour. The garages were all hidden far back behind the houses at the
ends of long driveways, and nobody left his car parked on the street.
When she approached Turner’s block she slowed to a walk, as
though she were catching her breath.

The house had lights on behind
the drawn blinds. She watched the windows for a few seconds and
glanced at her watch. It was five-thirty now. When she looked up, one
of the lights had gone off. She began to jog again. If he was turning
lights off, he must be coming out. She passed the house, keeping her
head forward but moving her eyes to the left to scan the house and
the yard. As she came abreast of the house, another light went off.

She saw the newspaper lying on
the front porch. As she trotted on down the street she wondered about
it. By now there was no chance he didn’t know that his office
had been raided. If he hadn’t been behind his desk at
Hoffen-Bayne when the cops came in and started padlocking filing
cabinets, then somebody certainly would have told him. Reporters
would call him. Was it possible that he wouldn’t bother to read
what the newspapers said about it the next morning?

She stopped running again at the
end of the block and looked back at the house as she crossed the
street. Two lights were still on. She started moving again, this time
down the street toward Wilshire, glancing back now and then to see if
anything had changed. Maybe he had gone out in the night to buy the
paper as soon as it had come off the presses. No, that didn’t
make sense; the newsstands carried only the early edition that had
been printed the previous afternoon, before the raid.

She turned and ran toward her
car. The sun would be up before long, and there would be people out
even in this quiet neighborhood. Inside her car she quickly changed
into a pair of jeans and a blouse.

She drove back down onto
Hillcrest. As she passed the house, the other two lights went off.
She checked her watch. It was exactly six o’clock. She was
positive now that the lights were on timers. The ones they sold in
hardware stores had crude dials on them, so it was difficult to set
them for any time but an hour or half hour. She had always used them
in her house when she went on a trip, and had solved the problem by
setting the present time on them not to correspond with what her
watch said. Turner wasn’t as good at this as she was. He might
be a thief, but he had not learned to think like one. He had not even
timed them to be sure they didn’t click off before the sun was
up.

Still, it was conceivable that
he had set them but hadn’t left yet. She stopped at a small
convenience store with an iron grate across the door, walked to the
pay telephone, and dialed his number. There was no answer and no
machine to record a message. She hung up after ten rings and got back
into the car. As she started it, she checked the rearview mirror and
saw a car coming that had lights on the roof like a police cruiser.
It had blue and yellow stripes, and the shield on the door said
“Intercontinental Security.” She pulled out and followed
it at a distance. The car swung up and down a couple of side streets
above Sunset, and then came down to Hillcrest, gliding along, the
driver glancing casually at all of the houses with blue-and-yellow
security signs. He pulled up at the curb in front of Turner’s
house and got out. He was young and broad-shouldered and wore a tight
uniform like a cop’s with a gun belt that made him hold his
arms out a little from his sides as though he were carrying two
buckets. He opened the gate, ran a flashlight over a couple of side
windows, and picked up the newspaper. Turner was gone.

Jane drove on, turned left on
Sunset Boulevard and continued west to the entrance for the 405
freeway near U.C.L.A. This was the way Turner would have come after
he had heard the news. He could have turned south toward the airport,
but she was sure he had not done so. He was a conservative, judicious
man. He had taken the second ramp, the one that got him safely out of
town but didn’t incur the risk of appearing to flee the
country. He had gone north to his house in Monterey.

Jane
came up over the hill that separated the city from the San Fernando
Valley and edged to the right onto the Ventura Freeway, then stayed
on it as far as Santa Barbara before she stopped for breakfast in the
restaurant of a sprawling hotel complex along the beach. By the time
the food was cooked she was too impatient to eat, so she had the
waitress put it in a Styrofoam container and took it with her in the
car. North of the city at the Santa Barbara airport, she turned in
the rented car and took a commuter flight to San Francisco, then
rented another car there to drive down the coast to Monterey. It was
early evening when she checked into a small motel a mile inland from
the ocean, showered, and wrapped herself in a towel.

She sat on the bed and dialed
Carey McKinnon’s number, then hung up before it rang. She had
been waiting, listening to the static while the telephone company’s
computers threw switches to move the call across the country to
Carey’s house, and she sensed in herself a feeling that was not
right. She had not been calling because she wanted to give him a
message of love before he dropped off to sleep, or even to soothe
herself with the sound of his voice. These were the only legitimate
reasons for calling Carey tonight. If the eagerness she had been
feeling was morbid curiosity or the grim satisfaction of confirming a
suspicion, then the only decent thing to do was leave him alone.

She opened her suitcase and
looked at her clothes. She decided that evening in Monterey was an
occasion for basic black. She put on a black turtleneck sweater, a
matching jacket, and black pants, then tied her hair back. The
accessories were what would make such an outfit. She laid out the few
items of female paraphernalia she had brought and made her
selections. She fastened her hair with a black ring and a thin
five-inch-long peg that had a T-shaped handle at one end and was
sharpened at the other. Before she put the perfume bottle into her
purse she opened it and sniffed cautiously. It had a soft wildflower
smell with a little touch of damp earth that tickled the nose a
little. It was a mixture of mayapple and water hemlock roots that she
had mashed and strained into a clear concentrate. Eating the roots
was the customary Iroquois method of suicide.

For her feet she chose a pair of
twenty-dollar black leather Keds. They had gum soles like sneakers,
but the soles had no distinctive lines or patterns. They were merely
plain, flat, and rough, a texture that could make it hard to
distinguish the prints they left as a human track, let alone identify
them as the prints of a particular woman’s shoe.

She left the lights on in her
motel room in case she returned, but put her suitcase in the trunk of
the car in case she didn’t. She made her preparations carefully
because she could not have said what she was preparing for. As she
started the car and pulled out of the lot, she began to feel uneasy.
If she had seen another woman adorning her hair with a spike designed
to be driven into a person’s chest, or popping a vial of
hemlock extract into her purse, she would have said that the woman
was on her way to kill someone. People who brought along weapons
without knowing why had a tendency to find out why after they
arrived.

She ran a quick inventory of the
thoughts she had about Turner. She suspected that he was a man who
stole from children, but she had not discovered any evidence that he
had ordered the deaths of Timmy and his parents, or told anybody to
kill Mona and Dennis rather than let them into the courtroom. She
wanted to watch him and study him. He didn’t seem to be a
physical threat, and she was not suddenly feeling the urge to go and
supply herself with a gun; that would have been a bad sign. The
poison proved nothing. Over the years she had promised clients that
she would die rather than reveal where she had taken them. To say
this without keeping within reach the means to accomplish it would
have made it a lie.

Jane drove down Morales Prospect
past the address and took a long, careful look. The house was set far
back on the deep lot, partly concealed by a few tall pine trees that
had been left standing when the house was built. The second floor was
fake Tudor, with a high, steep mansard roof that didn’t go with
it, and the ground floor had a brick facade about six feet high.
There were dim lights on in the second-story windows, but the
bottom-floor windows were dark. Even the porch light was off. As she
passed, she could see that the house was sheltered on three sides by
the remnants of the pine grove. The trees ran right up to the edge of
the driveway and nearly touched the garage.

She drove up the road looking
for a place to leave her car. A half mile farther she found a closed
gas station with five or six cars lined up along the side waiting to
be fixed. One of them had its hood off and in its place was a tarp of
heavy-gauge plastic taped down to keep the sea air out of its engine.
She pulled into the lot with her lights off, parked next to this car,
and moved the tarp to her own hood.

She walked back along the road,
keeping in the shadows of hedges and trees inside the property lines
of the big front yards so that any headlights unexpectedly shining on
her would fall on her black hair and black clothes and not on her
face and hands. But this part of Monterey was a winding
seventeen-mile scenic route, so people probably drove it in the
daytime when they could see it.

In ten minutes Jane was standing
among the trees in the side yard of the house. She felt the soft,
cushioned layer of long needles on the ground and smelled the pine
scent in the dark, still air. She made her way to the garage and
looked in the window. She could see the gleaming finish of the black
BMW inside. This was the place where Turner had come to wait out the
scandal, leaving the questions and cameras to his lawyer. She walked
slowly and quietly around the house, staying back among the trees.

She studied the lower windows,
then the upper ones. She scanned the eaves and gutters for spotlights
that might automatically come on if she made a noise, but she saw
nothing that worried her.

She wanted to see Alan Turner.
She returned to the spot where she felt most sheltered by the trees,
at the back corner, and watched the lighted upper windows on two
sides of the house. There was no glow of a television set, no shadows
on the ceiling from anyone walking across any of the rooms. She felt
a strong urge to see what he was doing and what he looked like
tonight.

Maybe she had come too late, and
he had lain down to rest with the lights on and fallen asleep. He had
driven much farther than she had, and had probably done a lot of it
at night, so he would be tired.

She felt drawn to the light.
When she walked to the side of the house to peer into a window, she
saw the little yellow-and-blue sticker of Intercontinental Security.
It made her take a step backward while she tried to analyze the
uneasiness this gave her. It had begun to seem that every building
she had seen since she started looking into Timmy’s problems
had one of these stickers on its window. Alarm systems didn’t
surprise her – she had one herself – but California
seemed to be blanketed with Intercontinental stickers. Had it been
that way for years without her seeing it?

But of course Turner’s
houses would be protected by the same company that Hoffen-Bayne used.
He probably hid the cost of the alarm systems for both houses in the
monthly fee for Hoffen-Bayne. She decided that her uneasiness was
only the result of having her attention focused on the signs. If
somebody she knew got a disease she had never heard of, suddenly she
would notice articles in the newspapers about it and overhear people
talking about it until it seemed that the whole world had been
infected.

She pushed the security company
out of her mind and forced herself to think about the sticker in a
way that was of more immediate use. It warned her that Turner had an
alarm system. Whatever interior traps and gadgets the system had,
they would probably be turned off if he was still up and walking
around, or he would risk setting them off himself. The perimeter
circuits would certainly be turned on.

She studied the building for its
weakness. The alarm system would protect the windows and doors. The
high, steep roof didn’t have skylights or big vents, and if he
were in an upstairs room, he would hear her walking up there. She
looked down. This house was like most in California. The ground never
froze, so they had no basements. Houses were bolted to three-foot
foundations with a crawl space under the floors for pipes and wires.
Near the side door by the kitchen was a little wooden trap to cover a
two-by-three-foot concrete access well. She lifted the cover off
quietly. As she looked down she had a momentary foreboding of spiders
and rats, but she pretended there were no such things. She crawled
under the house and pulled the trap back over the opening.

Beneath her was bare, powdery
dirt. It was dark under the house, but she could see moonlight coming
through little screened openings placed at intervals in the
foundation. She found the gas pipe from the kitchen overhead and
followed it slowly toward the center of the house, making out thick
drain pipes and thinner water pipes here and there. Finally she
reached the place where the gas pipe jointed and went upward. There
was a square opening in the floor beside it about three feet wide.

She reached up to touch the
place where the opening ended. It was a big square fabric filter. She
pushed up on it and tilted it, then brought it down under the house
with her. She reached up again and felt the row of burners. There was
only about a foot and a half of space between the business part of
the gas furnace and the floor, but she estimated that she could
probably fit. She felt carefully around the inside of the furnace
until she found the panel that slipped off so the filter could be
removed and cleaned. That must be the front.