Shadow Woman (27 page)

Linda looked down the list of
debts. There was no mortgage on the house, and none listed as having
been paid off. That interested her. Either Jane had paid cash, which
would have raised eyebrows, or she had inherited the house.

Linda returned to Probar’s
menu and asked for probate court filings for the state of New York.
She started the computer in Santa Ana on its search for the name and
waited. This would take some time.

Linda stared at the glowing
screen while she thought about Jane. Linda was beginning to feel her
now. She was – how had Seaver said it? – fit. That was
it. She did exercises and pushed herself the way Linda did. It wasn’t
just because she wanted to get the attention that came when your abs
were tight and your ass round and firm, but because she might have to
run or fight. She had fought a man that night in Las Vegas, Seaver
had said – not hit some old night watchman over the head when
he wasn’t looking, but faced off with a grown man who was
trying to hurt her. That meant she was fast and dirty, because there
was no other way it could happen. A man could be dumb as a buffalo
and lead with his face, and there was still no way a woman, at most
two-thirds his weight, could stand there and take turns throwing
punches with him. She was probably a lot like Linda.

The computer screen flashed
awake again with the probate documents Linda had requested. The
former owner of the house was Alice Whitefield. Before that it had
been Henry Whitefield and Alice Whitefield. Linda perused Alice
White-field’s bequest. She had died twelve years ago and left
everything to her daughter Jane, age twenty-one. Everything had not
been much – the house, contents valued at under thirty
thousand; a ten-year-old Plymouth; a bank account with nine thousand
in it.

Linda left the court files.
There was one last piece of information that she needed to conjure
tonight. She selected the records of the County Clerk of Erie County.
Linda typed in Jane Whitefield’s name and address, copied her
date of birth from her driver’s license. When the Probar
computer found the document Linda was startled. She read it twice to
make sure. Jane Whitefield had been married on June 21, to Carey
Robert McKinnon, 5092 Dodge Road, Amherst, New York.

Linda felt a sense of
fulfillment, of completeness. She was beginning to know Jane
Whitefield now. Probably this Carey McKinnon had started her out when
she was young, the way Earl had started Linda. It had probably been
about the time when her mother had died and she found herself alone
with an old house and a cheap car and barely enough money for a good
vacation. He had told her she was going to learn a lot and see a lot,
and make a lot of money. And here she was, ten or twelve years later,
out alone, risking her life to make people like Pete Hatcher vanish.

Linda went back to the menu and
began to work magic on Carey McKinnon. It took her an hour to find
out more about him than she knew about Jane. She glanced at her watch
frequently now, because the time was almost certainly coming. She had
given Lenny her telephone number as soon as she had moved in, so Earl
would have it by now. The telephone rang at midnight.

“Hello, Linda.”

“Hi,” she said. She
wanted to sound unperturbed and self-sufficient. “How’s
it going?”

“Not so hot,” said
Earl. “I found his car in Billings, between a couple of hotels.
I plugged the gas line so it would turn over but not start, but he
hasn’t come back for it, and I haven’t had any luck at
the hotels. Where are you?”

“I’m in a little
place south of Buffalo called the Meadow-green Suites. You get a
kitchen and a refrigerator, but you don’t have to make the
bed.”

“What have you got?”

“Her name is Jane
Whitefield. She has a house in a little town north of Buffalo along
the Niagara River called Deganawida. That’s where the answering
machine is.”

“Is she home, or do I have
to watch my back for her too?”

“I don’t know yet.
My guess is that she’s already out there with him.”

“When will you know?”

“Tomorrow morning. It’s
a little more complicated than I thought. She got married in June.”

“Know anything about her
husband?”

“What I know doesn’t
make too much sense to me yet. His name is Carey McKinnon, and he’s
a doctor.”

There was a short pause while
Earl ruminated. “It could be she dreamed that up as an identity
for one of her favorite clients and then got him to marry her –
you know, he says he’s a doctor that’s retired, and he
doesn’t have to explain why he’s got a lot of money and
plays golf all day.”

“I thought of that,”
said Linda. “But his credit check says he’s actually
getting payments from a hospital, and from some surgical group. He’s
in the A.M.A. directory. They don’t let you flash a fake ID and
go operate on somebody.”

“A double beard, then?”
asked Earl. “Maybe he’s queer and gets to hide it –
nobody wants a surgeon who might have AIDS – and she gets to be
that much harder to find. Does he have a separate house?”

“Yeah. But I don’t
know if one of them is empty. If they don’t live together, she
wouldn’t be much of a beard in a town that size. I just got
this stuff an hour ago, and I’m thirty miles from there, but
I’ll be out early to see if she’s at his house or hers,
or neither. You know, it occurred to me that he could be some kind of
fanatic.”

“What kind of fanatic?”

“We know she took Pete
Hatcher out. We don’t know why, or if he’s typical, or
one of a kind. There are these groups that take battered women and
children out the same way, like the Underground Railroad. The first
person to see somebody like that is a doctor. That kind of group
might hire a pro like her to do the hard part, and that’s how
they met. Maybe Pete Hatcher was just the money for their honeymoon.”

“Get on them,” he
said.

“What does it sound like
I’m doing, Earl?”

“I mean really get on
them,” he said. “Hatcher has me out here in Billings,
Montana, watching a parked car. I don’t think he accomplished
that alone. If she’s home, I’d like to know it. If she’s
not, I’d at least like a picture of her so she can’t walk
up to me on the street and blow my head off. If her husband’s
gone, I’d like to know that I’ve got him to expect too,
and what he looks like.”

“I’ll know if
they’re here in a few hours.”

“If he specializes in
plastic surgery and he could be busy making Pete Hatcher look like
Miss Arkansas, I’d like to know that. I’m dead in the
water out here. Whatever you can get me, whatever it takes to get
it.”

“Whatever?” She let
her voice go soft and low. She savored the pause on his end of the
line. There was the electrical charge, growing and growing, and the
resistance was making the air hotter. There was nothing in the world
like hunting, knowing that any click in the dark could be the slide
of the pistol locking the first round into the chamber.

He was feeling it too. “I
mean do whatever you have to, and then do some more. If you think
they’re going to pay us a couple hundred thousand and write it
off after three months, you’re dreaming. One of these days
you’re going to call home and it won’t be Lenny that
answers. It’ll be Seaver.”

“I know,” she said.
“I’ll do my best, I promise.”

“If she’s there,
kill her. I’ll call tomorrow night.” He hung up.

Linda put the telephone receiver
on the hook, lay on the bed, and stared at the ceiling. She toyed
with the fear, tested it for titillation. It made her heart beat
fast, and a little electric shock clapped her back behind her lungs,
then moved down the sides to her haunches like a shiver. Playing for
death was better than anything.

But tonight there was something
extra, something that made it better and more delicious. It was Jane.
She was the attraction. There was an urge to take a risk to beat her.
Linda was going to be the one who was smarter, faster, dirtier. She
was going to be the one.

Jane
left the rented car at the agency in Missoula and picked up the one
she had parked on the university campus. Pete Hatcher watched
everything she did and listened to her explanations, then nodded his
head. He had stopped asking questions, and that set off a tiny alarm
in the back of Jane’s mind. It would not be out of the question
for a man in his position to be contemplating suicide. It was also
possible that he was only getting tired and passive. If that lasted
long enough, it wasn’t much different from suicide.

She drove him northeast on Route
200 away from Missoula, and stopped at a motel in a small town called
Potomac. They sat in the car for a moment. She waited for him to ask
a question. Finally, she pulled a small leather wallet out of her
purse and handed it to him.

“What’s this?”
he asked.

“We need to sleep now.
This is a motel. It isn’t part of a national chain, so that
makes its records a lot harder to get. If we do everything the way
everybody else does, we’re invisible. What everybody else does
is that the man goes inside and registers. For the moment, we’re
going to travel as Mr. and Mrs. Michael Phelan of Los Angeles. I have
identification that matches. Now go do it.”

Too soon, he came out of the
office and walked to the car. “They don’t have any suites
or anything like that,” he said. “Should I rent two
rooms?”

She closed her eyes and took a
deep breath. He seemed to have lost his will to keep his mind
working. “Pull yourself together and think. Mr. and Mrs. Phelan
don’t sleep in separate rooms. Get it over with.”

He disappeared inside the office
again and came out carrying a key. She watched him open the door,
then started the car and pulled it into a parking space a distance
from the room and went to join him inside. She surveyed the room. Her
eyes rested on the king-size bed in the center of the floor. She
forced them to move on. That was an extra problem with hiding a man.
Dancing around in cramped quarters to keep the distances proper and
the bodies covered became part of the job. She decided not to face
that conversation yet. Anything she said now would not get a second
bed in here, and would make him more passive and tentative.

She looked out the windows,
checked the locks, examined the curtains, and continued her
commentary. “When you check in, you take a mental picture of
the world outside. The best way out of here is to the left, toward
the car. I parked it in front of another door, away from the office.
If somebody finds out we’re here, he doesn’t know which
car is ours. If he finds the car, he doesn’t know which room is
ours. It’s late now, so most of the other cars that will be in
the lot are already here. Next time you look, what you’ll be
looking for is newcomers. You lock everything that will lock.”
She flipped the deadbolt and the safety latch. “If you do all
the little things right, you’ll sleep better.”

She glanced at her watch. “I’m
going out for a few minutes. When I come back I’ll knock four
times, like this.” She rapped on the table.

“Where are you going?”

“To make a phone call from
the booth at the gas station.”

“There’s a phone
right here.”

“There would be a record
of the call.”

She slipped out and walked
toward the car in case the night clerk happened to be watching, then
kept going past it and across the weedy margin of the property to the
gas station, put a quarter into the telephone slot, and dialed zero,
then the number of the house in Amherst. “I’d like to
make a collect call. It’s Jane.”

She heard Carey pick up the
telephone. “Operator.” The word came out before he had
even said hello. “Will you accept a collect call from Jane?”

“Sure,” he said. The
operator clicked off. “Jane?”

“Hi,” she answered.

“You okay?”

“Yes. I found him, and I
picked him up, and now I’ve got him hundreds of miles away. I
think we’re two hops ahead of them. Maybe only one hop, but
it’s a good one.”

“Where are you?”

The question startled her. She
had never talked to anybody at home while she was working – not
really talked, because she had always lied. She felt a twinge almost
like pain when she said, “I’m in a little town in the
Wild West. At least I think I’m in town. There’s not much
here, so I can’t be sure.”

“A hotel or something?”

“Sure. It’s not the
Hilton, but I haven’t seen any cockroaches either.” She
was saying words that were true, but she was lying. He wanted to know
everything, and she was giving him breezy nonsense.

“You’re staying
with… him? That can’t be safe.”

The lie came easily, like
breathing, really. “Well, no, not exactly. One of the tricks of
the trade. He’s in his motel room and I checked into another
room across the parking lot. That way I can watch his door, and if
anything suspicious happens, all I have to do is dial his room. He
goes out the window on the side I can see is clear, and I pick him up
on the highway.”

She knew it sounded plausible.
She had been lying for so long that it was almost a reflex. She had
heard the trouble building in his voice, and she had flinched to
evade it. She pushed the question and the answer into a corner of her
mind and labeled the corner a special exception. She had been trying
to save him some anxiety, and the anxiety would have been pointless,
because he would have been worrying about a dangerous situation that
she had no way to evade. Or maybe, in the back of his mind, he had
been worried about… something else. That was something she
simply was not going to do, so worrying about it would serve no
purpose. She loved Carey McKinnon.

Carey was already talking. “I'm
sorry,” she said. “I missed that.”

“I said, Do you know where
you’re going next, or when you’ll be home?”