Shadow Woman (53 page)

Jane did not return until after
midnight. She turned off the lights of her rented car, pulled far
enough up the drive to keep a passing cop from getting curious, and
walked toward the house. The chain-link fence was topped with barbed
wire, but there were no insulators for electricity, so she pried off
ten feet of it with the tire iron from her rented car, climbed it,
and dropped to the lawn.

There was a kennel in the back
yard with a pen and a long exercise run, but she knew that the dogs
were far past barking, so she skirted close to it and studied the
house. It was a five- or six-bedroom one-story ranch structure coated
with white stucco. She walked around it, looking for motion sensors,
automatic lights, indications of the sort of alarm system it had.
There were no security company’s signs anywhere on the
property, no stickers on any of the windows. Most of the windows were
dark, but she could see two with dim lights glowing behind them. She
cautiously approached the first and peered inside. Through the
curtain, she could just see a lamp on a desk. She moved to the other
side of the window and looked at the place where the cord led to the
electrical outlet. She could see the little plastic box and the
circular dial. The light was on a timer.

She walked to the other lighted
window and saw another lamp on a timer. She considered. The timers
meant that nobody was home. There were no signs of an alarm system.
It made sense that a professional killer would not want to have his
house wired with devices whose sole purpose was to summon the police.
And most of the time, the dogs would have warned him long before any
intruder came close enough to enter the building where he slept.

She decided to take the chance.
Earl and the second man were dead, but there was a strong likelihood
that they had left some notes, some information about Pete Hatcher
that could give a new set of killers a start. And there was still the
woman who had trapped Pete in Denver. The woman might not be the sort
who would come after Pete alone, but unless Jane found out who she
was, there would be no way to predict anything about her.

Jane walked to the kitchen door,
swung her tire iron to shatter the upper pane of glass, reached
inside, unlocked the door, and entered. There was no noise, and there
was no electrical contact in the frame that could have set off a
silent alarm when the door opened.

She felt for the light switch
and turned it on. The kitchen was modern and very expensive – a
professional-size Wolf stove, Sub-Zero refrigerator, vast surfaces of
green marble, the dull gleam of stainless steel – but when she
looked in the drawers and cupboards there were few containers or
implements to indicate that much cooking went on here.

She walked into the living room.
There was electronic equipment, all small modular boxes piled up into
towers and banks along one wall. Some of it she recognized –
television monitors, VCRs, speakers, compact disc players, cable TV
descrambler, tape recorders of various kinds – but among them
were other boxes and monitors that seemed to belong to computers. To
her it appeared that the man who lived here simply bought things. It
occurred to her that each item in this house probably represented
some person’s life. People had been changed into leather
couches and marble counters and electronic gadgets.

She moved up the hallway and
found Earl’s bedroom. Her nostrils picked up the faint scent
she remembered smelling when his body had fallen on her, a mixture of
sweat and gun oil and some kind of hair tonic. She waited for the
wave of nausea it induced to pass, then began her search by the
telephone, but she found no paper in the room for writing down
numbers or messages.

She opened the sliding door
beside her and found a custom-built closet with drawers and racks and
hanging clothes. It was the hat rack that caught her eye first. There
were a dozen baseball caps with the logos of teams and manufacturers
of trucks and farm machinery, but others that said fbi, police, or
swat team. In a bottom drawer she found two black ski masks with eye
and mouth holes and a wide selection of gloves. He didn’t wear
those in southern California to keep warm.

She stepped to the rack of
hanging clothes and confirmed the impression that had been building
in her mind. There were clothes of all kinds – conservative
suits and moth-eaten wool hunting shirts, a tuxedo beside an army
field jacket that was in a plastic bag because it was covered with
dirt. Earl had uniforms. There were the midnight-blue shirt and pants
of the Los Angeles Police Department beside the hot-weather version
with short sleeves, a khaki Highway Patrol uniform, a blue
windbreaker with the word police in bold reflective letters like the
ones plainclothes cops slipped on for raids. There were work clothes
for the Department of Water and Power, Southern California Gas,
Pacific Bell. Earl had been able to impersonate virtually anyone.

She left the bedroom and went up
the hall to see what Earl had kept in the other rooms. She reached
the door on the end, turned on the light, and drew in a breath.

It was a woman’s bedroom.
Earl had not lived in the house alone. It was inconceivable that a
man like Earl would have one woman who lived in a house with his
collection of police uniforms but asked no questions and a second who
went out with him to kill people. This was almost certainly the woman
who had ambushed Pete Hatcher in Denver. Jane opened the nearest
closet. The clothes on the hangers were like everything else in the
house: they bore very expensive labels without being especially
appealing or tasteful choices, and all of them seemed too recent.
There was such a profusion of new clothes that Jane wondered how
anybody could spend so much time shopping. She tried to focus her
mind on the immediate need to use her time efficiently. If the woman
lived here, then there was a strong possibility that she could show
up without warning. She had been in Denver, but Jane had seen no sign
of a woman in Montana.

Jane spent ten minutes searching
for framed photographs, albums, anything that might tell her what the
woman looked like, but she found nothing. She looked more closely at
the clothes in the hope that they would help her form an image of the
woman’s size and shape, but it was a pointless exercise. It
seemed to Jane that every woman she had seen in California was a size
eight, between five feet six and five feet eight.

She kept searching. The woman
was vain and a bit self-indulgent. The room beside this one was a
dressing room with a huge lighted mirror. The cosmetics, creams,
perfumes, and oils in tiny jars and bottles were all brands so
expensive that most women would not have recognized them.

She went into the bathroom
connected with the bedroom and found it to be the same. There was a
glass shower with marble walls that would have held five people and
complicated fixtures for spraying water at different intensities and
different angles. There was a sunken bathtub with Jacuzzi jets, a
steam machine for facials, and here, too, the same profusion of
unguents and lotions and oils, enough to last several lifetimes.

The door on the far side of the
bathroom opened into the exercise room. There was a stationary bike,
a treadmill, a Nautilus machine, weights, padded benches,
step-stairs, pulley contraptions. The whole inner wall was one
immense mirror with a ballet barre. Jane tried to understand this
woman. The size of her clothes indicated that she took care of
herself, but the equipment in this room was not of the quality or
variety that most people put in their homes. It was all the
industrial-grade gear that gyms bought. She lifted the bar of the
exercise machine. If the setting was for the woman, then she was a
specimen, Jane thought. Maybe Earl had used the equipment too.
Through the French door on the outer wall, Jane could see a thin
strip of moonlight on water – a pool, too, right at the woman’s
doorstep. But it wasn’t the pretty kind, or the sort where
people had fun swimming together. It was a single-lane lap pool. It
reminded Jane of the dogs’ exercise run by the kennel.

Jane moved back into the woman’s
bedroom. The whole house made her uncomfortable, vaguely afraid. She
was fascinated and repelled by the mundane details, the fixtures of
the man and woman’s daily life here. She could not get herself
to set aside the thought that each extravagance looked like a single
spree, as though one day they must have come home from killing
someone and used the money to buy a room full of exercise equipment.
Another day they would come home and hire a contractor to remodel the
woman’s bedroom. She wondered if they thought about the people
afterward: this room was cutting John Smith’s throat, and this
one was shooting Bob and Betty Johnson through their heads in their
sleep.

She looked around her at the
place where the woman slept. The woman dressed as other women did,
and liked the amenities that other women liked, but there was too
much of everything, and it all seemed a little bit off. It seemed to
Jane that it was like the room of a man impersonating a woman:
transvestites never seemed to wear an oversized sweatshirt and blue
jeans. She remembered the weights in the exercise room: maybe she had
stumbled on the truth. She took a pair of slacks out of the closet
and measured the ratio of the hips to the waist. No, the clothes
would not have fit on a body that had not been born female.

But everything in the house was
wrong. The kitchen was not a place where anything was cooked. It was
a hoard of appliances and glossy surfaces. The living room looked as
though no one ever sat in it. The furniture was all too well matched
to have been bought any way but at once, and it was spatially
arranged to be neither attractive nor comfortable, just placed so
that there would be room for a lot of it. She looked at the bed. It
was king-sized, too big for one person, but she could not imagine the
people who had lived here doing anything so human and comprehensible
as sleeping on it together.

Jane opened the second closet
and found the boxes of wigs. The woman had good ones, all genuine
human hair. There were short ones, falls to take on and off, curly
ones and straight ones. Jane took a quick inventory. The woman had
light brown, dark brown, red, black, auburn, even gray. The only kind
missing was blond.

Jane pushed aside some clothes
and saw the door of a gun cabinet. It was built like a safe, with a
five-digit combination lock. There was no hope of looking inside, but
Jane decided that she had seen enough of Earl’s arsenal
already: what she wanted would be on paper. But the gun cabinet
struck her as part of the impersonation. The room was so
aggressively, insistently feminine, so exclusively the domain of a
woman, that it was a perfect place for a cache of weapons.

She still had rooms to account
for. She closed the closet and left the bedroom, then walked down the
hall into an office. It had two desks, two telephones, two computers.
There were no photographs here, either.

The filing cabinets were full of
records of payments – some made by Earl Bliss, some made by
Northridge Detectives – but no records of receipts, no
notations relating to income, no lists of clients. Whatever useful
information existed, it was probably in the computers. She searched
the desk drawers. At first she found only office supplies, but the
deep one on the right side of the second desk was full of electronic
gear. There was a box of tiny short-range audio transmitters for
hiding inside household objects, more powerful ones with prongs for
plugging into wall sockets, even one that had been disguised as a
night-light for a child’s room. There were receivers and
long-range microphones. She closed the drawer.

The place had once been a
bedroom, so there was a closet here, too. She opened it, and the
sight made her shiver. There was a handyman’s pegboard. On it
hung handcuffs like the police used, thumbcuffs with jagged inner
edges that could do terrible damage if a prisoner struggled, a
two-foot coil of piano wire with handles on both ends, a couple of
long spikes like skewers. She lifted a small box from the shelf and
took off the top. There were hypodermic needles and bottles. She read
the labels and she could see they had been stolen from a hospital:
anectine for stopping the heart, insulin for inducing shock, heroin
for an overdose the L.A. coroner would find familiar and explicable.
She put the box back and found the little press.

She looked at it without
understanding until she opened the box beside it. Inside was a stack
of blank gold plastic cards, all bearing the symbols of Visa and
MasterCard. The machine was a die for pressing names and numbers into
fake credit cards. Her breath caught in her throat. Maybe some of the
blanks had the woman’s picture on them. She shuffled through
them eagerly, but found no picture. Her eyes passed across the little
press. There was still type clamped in the die. She read it backward:
Susan Preston Haynes. Of course it was a false name, or the woman
wouldn’t have needed to make the credit card at home. Knowing a
false name was not going to get Jane any closer to the woman.

She looked around her at the
room. The malevolence of the house was strongest here. The perverse
eagerness to hurt, to render human beings into money made her sick.
She glanced at the computers. Without codes and passwords, they were
locked as tightly as the gun cabinet.

Jane sat at the nearest desk and
tried to defeat the sick, nervous feeling in her stomach. Her mind
had been calmly, logically working its way toward the conclusion that
she had to wait as long as it took for this woman to come in the
door, and then kill her. It was simple, practical, rational, and
utterly wrong. She had just shot two men. But there was an immense
difference between shooting back at a killer and crouching in this
horrible place with the lights out, waiting for the door to open so
she could bring a knife across a person’s throat. She was not
going to do it.