Runner (39 page)

She watched them go to the front door, unlock it, and go inside. Now that it was dark out, she could look through the dark glass and see the janitors working in lighted offices. When they went into a room they would turn on the light, and that single square on the side of the black building would become transparent. First one of the men went from room to room emptying wastebaskets into a large plastic trash can on wheels. After he had done that he would take a rag and a bottle of glass cleaner to the desks and the windows. Coming along behind him, the second man ran the vacuum cleaner on the carpets and turned off the light. The two worked quickly, and Jane could follow their progress easily from outside.

When the first man went outside to wheel the trash can to the Dumpster, he stuck a doorstop in the front door to keep it ajar so he could get back in. While he was out of sight, Jane got out of her SUV wearing her work uniform, baseball cap, and dust mask. She went to the front door and slipped inside. Surveillance cameras were
almost always mounted high, so she kept her head low as she hurried down the hall.

The two janitors had finished with the now-darkened interiors of the offices, so she hurried to one on the first floor, went inside, and crawled under the desk to wait. She heard the elevator doors open and close a couple of times in the quiet building as the men moved from one floor to another. Some time later she heard them return with the electric buffer and polish the lobby.

When Jane heard the sounds of the men moving their equipment outside, she waited a few more minutes, then got up and cautiously walked down the hall. Their van was gone, and she was alone in the dimly lit building. She could explore freely. After looking at the signs on a few doors, she found one off the main lobby that said,
RICHARD BEALE, PRESIDENT
. She looked the other way and saw the glass wall of the atrium, and in front of it, the receptionist's desk where she had seen Christine in the photographs on the Internet.

She opened the door to Beale's office and stopped. There were no windows. The office was the right size—a bit bigger than the others—and it had the right sort of furniture: large leather couches, a long polished conference table, and a big glass-topped desk with very little on it except a computer screen and a keyboard and a telephone. But it seemed terribly odd to her that the office of the owner of a prosperous company would have no windows.

She set the thought aside for the moment because there were things she had to do. She pushed a chair to the spot directly below the dome that covered the surveillance camera, used the blade of her pocketknife to pry the dark plastic dome off, then stopped again in surprise. The video cable for the camera had been disconnected. It had been unscrewed. Jane replaced the dome, got down, and moved along the walls looking carefully at every shelf or fixture to be sure
there wasn't a buttonhole camera hidden somewhere. She found nothing.

Apparently Richard Beale had disabled the security camera himself. Now she had a better idea of what had made him pick the darkest, most closed-in office in his own company. He probably made deals in here with people like the ones he had sent after Christine. And Christine had said he was very careful that he not be the one to sign certain papers or have his name on certain deals. It wouldn't make much sense to videotape himself doing things that were illegal.

She began a methodical search of the room. She went through the files in the cabinet, plucking out the papers that seemed useful. The computer and the printer were turned on, and the printer had a copier function, so she copied the lists of buildings currently for sale or rent, the property tax files showing property the company had paid taxes on. Jane was particularly interested in addresses where land was registered in a name other than Beale Company. She worked quickly, scanning one paper while another was copied, leaving files opened so she could return each sheet to its place.

She found the articles of incorporation of the Beale Company and its subsequent filings with the Department of Corporations. The corporate papers were over forty years old, and the owners and officers were listed as Andrew and Ruby Beale. Richard Beale had signed for the past few years as the president of the company, but he was not listed as an owner, or even a stockholder. There were only two shares of stock, one owned by Ruby Beale and the other by Andrew Beale.

There was a personnel file for Richard Beale, so she checked to verify that his address was the one Sharon had given her. His salary was "as negotiated," and his payroll record showed he made about two hundred thousand dollars a year. He lived in a house in
Del Mar owned by the company and drove a company car, a black Porsche. There were no personnel files for Steve Demming, Ronnie Sebrot, Pete Tilton, Claudia Marshall, Sybil Landreau, or Carl McGinnis.

When Jane had copied the records she wanted, she readjusted her dust mask and hat so she would not be identifiable on the surveillance cameras in the lobby, turned off the lights, and hurried out to the SUV.

Jane drove back to Sharon's house after two
A.M.
, and made a careful search of the grounds and the surrounding streets before she went in. She had chosen to stay at Sharon's because she was hoping to surprise one or more of Richard Beale's thugs as they watched Sharon's house, but so far, she had seen no sign of them. She arranged blankets over some pillows to make Sharon's bed look occupied, then took a spare quilt and lay on the floor in the hallway leading from the kitchen to the living room with her two guns beside her where she could reach them in the dark. From there she judged she would be able to hear if someone broke in looking for Sharon.

Jane drowsed, then awoke suddenly and looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was almost three
A.M.
She had just fallen into a pleasant dream about Carey, then felt a panicky sensation, a fear that she was losing him. She stood, went out the back door of Sharon's house, and got into her SUV. She drove to the plaza where the big Sears store was, and parked beside the pay telephone she had seen in the afternoon. She dialed the number of the house in Amherst, New York, and put in enough coins for three minutes.

"Hello?"

"Hi. I knew it was six there, and you'd be getting ready for work. I couldn't relax until I talked to you."

"That's nice. I think it's nice, anyway. Unless you were dreaming about lawyers. Were you?"

"No lawyers. And it
is
nice. Your ears should be burning. And don't be alarmed if lots of other places are burning, too."

"You don't happen to be anywhere near here, do you? I could meet you somewhere—pick up a bottle of champagne and an orchestra on the way."

"I'm not near, but I wish I were. I just felt kind of desperate to say something."

"What is it?"

"That I'm sorry if things seemed a little hollow when I left home. I love you completely, and I will until I die. And probably when my heart stops, there will still be a few seconds before I lose consciousness, and I'll try to remember as many of the days I had with you as I can before my mind goes dark."

"Jane, are you in danger now?"

"No. Not at all. I'm just taking care of some things here. I called because I was afraid you were feeling as though I didn't love you enough. Or maybe I was feeling that I hadn't said it enough or said it right, or acted the way I wanted to."

"I'm glad you called. But I wasn't doubting you. I've been worried about you since long before ... before the hospital benefit. But it was a normal family sort of worry. I knew you'd been having a hard time about the baby and everything, but I haven't found a way to be of much help."

Jane smiled. "I'm not your patient, Carey. You can't approach it that way. Just keep trying the other way. Something still might happen."

"It's a deal."

"And if nothing happens, I want you to know it doesn't change
anything between us. You're it, the one I want. I have to finish what I'm doing right now, but after that everything will be the same."

"I would like it if you weren't out there taking risks."

"Don't worry. I'll be home soon. We'll talk then."

"That sounds terminal. Are you getting ready to hang up?"

"Yes. I want to say 'I love you' before I go, but I've just said it so many times you'll think I'm an idiot."

"Then let me be the idiot," he said. "I love you. Call again if you can, but I'll understand if you can't. Just come home safe."

"I will." She hung up, then got into her SUV and drove back to Sharon's house. She went in through the back door, settled into her spot in the corridor between the kitchen and the living room, and slept.

In the morning she drove past the Beale Company office in La Jolla again and verified that there was a black Porsche parked in the space marked
RESERVED FOR RICHARD BEALE
. Then she drove on.

Richard Beale's address was a house on the beach in Del Mar. Jane had been to Del Mar a couple of times about eight years ago. The beach at Del Mar was one of the prettiest inhabited places in the country. It had broad, white sand beaches that rose only slightly as they stretched up from the surf, and then tall groves of tropical trees that formed a curtain between the beach and the coast highway. The incredible blue Pacific was so enormous that having a few rich people living along its edge wasn't enough of a blight to be noticeable. The beaches were almost empty on a weekday morning, and most of the houses were low, sprawling structures that didn't irritate the eye.

She drove by the racetrack and then along the coast highway looking at street markers and mailboxes until she found the right number. From the road she could see only a tall wooden gate, a
hedge, and a closed garage door. She kept going along the road until she reached a mall built on several terraces set into a bluff across the road from the ocean. There were restaurants, a few upscale shops, and a bookstore. Jane parked her SUV on a side street above the mall where she could drive it out quickly, then went to a restaurant and had a simple breakfast while she watched the highway and the stores. It was not out of the question that she might see the two men and two women who had been searching for Christine. If Christine was being held at Richard Beale's house, then Beale would need to have someone to keep her there. Jane went into a shop and bought a tank top, a pair of running shorts, and some sneakers. She changed into them in the dressing room, then put her clothes in the SUV and went jogging.

The beach access was a forty-foot gap in the trees where the asphalt of the road gave way to sand. Jane trotted across the wide, soft expanse of beach to the hard, wet margin where the long, slow swells hissed in. It was easier to run on the wet sand, and running along the surf gave her a chance to look at the area as she approached Richard Beale's property. The only person she passed was a platinum blond woman about fifty years old throwing a tennis ball into the surf for her German shorthair to retrieve. When Jane found Beale's house, she could see no signs of life on the ocean side of it, and there were no lights and no movement visible beyond the big picture windows. She could see no other windows open.

Jane looked up and down the beach, but she saw no faces at any windows in nearby houses. The woman and her dog were moving off down the beach in the other direction, so Jane decided to take the chance. She jogged up on the soft sand until her angle hid her from the houses on either side, and stopped at the oceanfront entrance to the house.

She could see the roof was bare, with no transmitter that would send a wireless signal to an alarm company, and when she peered in the windows she could still see no sign of anyone inside. She stepped around to the street side of the house, where there was a large yard with a swimming pool that had boulders and a waterfall. Attached to the house was a two-car garage. She tried the side door of the garage, found it unlocked, and stepped inside. The back wall had hooks on it to hold various tools. Jane selected a pair of longhandled hedge trimmers. She went back out, cut the telephone line where it came off the roof to the metal junction box on the side of the house, then returned to the garage and opened the main power switch at the circuit breaker box.

Jane made no attempt to hide the damage she made in her entry. She had decided that it would be best for her to let Richard Beale worry about who had been here to visit him. She used a cordless electric drill that had been plugged into a charger on the workbench to drill out the woodwork beside the doorknob, and picked up a crowbar. She knew that alarm systems usually had batteries that would give them enough power to work if the electricity was cut, so she was prepared for some noise. She pushed the door open and stepped into the house.

The frantic electronic beeping came from the speaker of the keyboard on the wall unit beside the front door, so she followed the sound and used her crowbar to pry the unit off the wall, disconnected the wires in the back, and restored the silence. She knew the system would be automatically dialing its internal modem to register the break-in, but the phone line was cut, so the call would never connect.

Jane stepped farther into the house. As she moved from room to room, she formed a sense of the place. It was designed and furnished
for parties. There was a bar, lots of stylish, uncomfortable furniture and paintings with bold, stark lines in colors matched to the color scheme of each room—splashes of bright reds and yellows near the main entrance, calming down to sky blue and white near the beach side.

There was nothing homelike here. She stepped from room to room, searching for anything that would indicate that Christine had been living here, but there was nothing of Christine's. All the clothes in the closets were male. There were no toiletries of the sort that only women used. Jane looked farther into the house for hidden spaces. There was no locked door anywhere, and she paced a couple of interior rooms to be sure there wasn't any space between them that could be wide enough for a secret room.

She opened a closed door on the upper hall and found herself in a bright white room full of new baby furniture, baby clothes, toys, and equipment, but no sign that any of it had ever been used. Most of it was still in its original packaging. The crib mattress was still in a thick plastic wrapper.