Shadow Woman (54 page)

She looked around her, and her
eyes rested on a small sheet of paper that said Federal Express. It
was a receipt, the carbon copy of the mailing label on an overnight
package. The date on it was two weeks ago. She picked it up and
looked at it closely. The address box said, “Susan Haynes,
Meadowgreen Suites, Orchard Park, New York 14.127.” Orchard
Park was seven or eight miles from Buffalo, no more than fifteen from
Amherst.

Jane found herself standing. She
had to stop herself from dashing outside and running for the car. She
looked around her at the walls that enclosed her. This house seemed
as much of a threat as though it were alive. The computers were
probably full of information about Hatcher and about Jane, but there
were undoubtedly backup disks hidden somewhere else in the building.
The building was full of hiding places, locks, and secrets that she
could never hope to break. There were probably photographs of
Hatcher, and maybe of her too. There might even be electronic
equipment that was running right now, taking videotapes of Jane’s
visit.

She stepped to the kitchen,
where she remembered seeing books of matches with the names of
restaurants on them. Then she went outside, sliced off five feet of
the garden hose attached to the house, went into the garage and
syphoned gasoline out of the tank of the Mercedes into a bucket.

Jane poured the gasoline
liberally around the office and on the computers, in the two
bedrooms, in the closets. She filled the bucket again, then poured
gasoline along the inner walls of the living room, the exercise room,
the bathrooms. She poured another bucketful along the baseboards and
carpets at the outer walls of each room.

She dribbled a trail of gasoline
down the hallway, across the living room rug, and through the kitchen
to the back door. She poured gasoline on the kennel and along the
walls of the garage. Finally, she poured a stream of gasoline from
the kitchen steps to the garage, to the kennel.

Jane climbed back over the
chain-link fence, lit a match, and tossed it on the back lawn. The
vapor ignited with a
poof!
and a flash before the match could
land, and bright yellow and blue flames raced in three directions.
Jane hurried to her car. She saw the bright flare-up when the fire
reached the kitchen floor, the flames licking up the kitchen walls.

As she started her car and
backed out of the driveway, she saw the quick, purifying flames
lighting up one window after another. When she reached the first turn
in the road, she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw flames
billowing out of the front windows, illuminating the clouds of black
smoke that rose into the night sky.

Jane
stepped into the airline terminal, stopped near the door, and scanned
the monitors for the schedule of departures. There seemed to be no
flight for hours that stopped in Buffalo, so she chose a nonstop
flight to New York City that was leaving in ten minutes. She bought a
ticket under the name Julie Sternheim and ran for the gate.

As soon as the plane was in the
air and the seatbelt sign above her head went out, she used the Marie
Spellagio credit card to activate the telephone built into the seat
in front of her and dialed the number of the house in Amherst. She
heard the phone ring ten times, and she let it ring five more before
she gave up. She glanced at her watch. It was already four a.m. here,
so it would be seven in Buffalo. By now, Carey had probably scrubbed
and entered the operating room.

If the woman had been in Buffalo
for two weeks, she must have gone there straight from Denver –
been sent there from Denver. Earl Bliss had been the designated
shooter, and he seemed to have had all the money, so probably he had
been the one who made the decisions. He must have been smart enough
to know that from the moment Pete Hatcher had seen the woman’s
face, she had become a liability. So he had sent her to western New
York.

As Jane followed the path of
logic, she felt her stomach tightening. The woman had not simply been
excused from the hunt and sent home: she lived in Los Angeles. She
had not been bundled off into hiding in a place that just happened to
be near Jane’s hometown. They had sent her something there by
overnight mail. People in hiding didn’t need anything urgently
enough to require that it be sent in a way that left a record.

Jane tried to invent
coincidences that would confute her logic. Had she given Pete any
false identities that could have tied him to the western part of New
York State? That was impossible. She never sent chasers across her
own trail. Did Pete have any close friends or relatives there? When
she had asked him about friends and relatives, there had been none
east of Nebraska.

The address in Orchard Park
might mean something. Orchard Park wasn’t a big, bustling city
where people came and went by the thousand without attracting
attention. It was a suburb, a small upper-middle-class bedroom
community. It wasn’t a place to remain anonymous. It was a
place to establish an identity.

This woman could not have been
sent to spot Pete Hatcher. She was the only member of the team whose
face he had seen. There was only one reason Jane knew of for this
woman to be in western New York. That night on the mountaintop, when
Earl had been deciding how to kill her, he had called her Jane. The
woman must have known much more.

Jane began to sweat. The woman
had been there for two weeks. She’d had enough time to find out
– what? Where Jane lived, certainly. And that meant she knew
who Jane was married to. Jane snatched up the telephone again and
inserted her credit card. When she had punched in the area code, she
stopped.

Every time Jane had taken
Hatcher in a different direction, Earl had turned up with the rifle.
Jane’s throat was dry, and her head was throbbing. She had made
some terrible mistakes. The woman had probably found her address in a
day, and on the next day had broken into the house and bugged the
telephones. Jane had obligingly called every few days, and that had
somehow given her a location. Now this woman was waiting in Buffalo,
probably watching Carey, and Jane could not even call to warn him,
because the woman would be listening.

Jane forced herself to be calm
and tried to think of another way. She could call Carey’s
office. No, that was foolish. If the woman had been listening for a
call from Jane, she could not have assumed it would come to the
house. The woman would also have tapped the lines in Carey’s
office.

Carey was at the hospital right
now. There were hundreds of phone lines at the hospital. Tapping into
all of them would be a job for a team of electrical engineers, not
one person who knew how to plant a bug. Jane searched for a way to
use the complexity of the place. Carey would be in surgery for the
next couple of hours, where an outside telephone call could not reach
him. After that, he would be all over the building, walking the halls
to examine and discharge patients, read charts and scribble in files,
look at X rays and test results. There was no way to predict
precisely where he would be. If the operator didn’t have a
pretty clear fix on him, what would she do? She would page him.

Jane could not let that happen.
The person this woman wanted to find was Jane. The woman could not
assume that Jane would not show up in person instead of calling. The
woman could monitor her telephone taps with a tape recorder, but she
would have to watch Carey with her own eyes.

Suppose Jane didn’t call
Carey directly. She could call the nurses’ station in the
recovery room. Carey would certainly show up there immediately after
surgery, and then again later to clear the patient to be transported
to his own room upstairs. But what could Jane say to a nurse? She
could hardly ask some stranger to tell Dr. McKinnon he might be in
mortal danger because his wife hid fugitives.

For the moment, Carey was as
safe as he could be. Nobody could get into an operating room. The big
metal doors wouldn’t open unless someone inside hit a switch on
the wall. After that, he would be surrounded by people, going about
his business as he had been doing for two weeks while this woman had
been watching him.

The woman had not come to
Buffalo to harm Carey McKinnon. There was no extra pay for that. She
had come to watch him and use him to find out where Jane was. Carey
was only valuable to this woman if he was alive and unsuspecting. He
would be safe until… when? The moment when the woman saw Jane.

She sat strapped in her seat,
rigid. Maybe she should not be going home. Maybe the best favor she
could do for Carey McKinnon was to stay as far away from him as
possible. If she stayed away for long enough, the woman would have to
give up and go away. But then Jane realized that she was wrong. If
this woman had been keeping Carey in sight for two weeks, then the
woman could not be sure that Carey had never caught a glimpse of her,
never seen her face. If the woman got tired of waiting, she would not
just go away. Before she did, she would put a bullet in Carey’s
head.

Linda stared at the red zero on
her answering machine. If Earl had done it and gotten back to
civilization by now, he should have left a message for her. But maybe
he had called home. There was no question that he would call as soon
as he could reach a telephone. He would be thinking about what she
might be doing to keep Carey McKinnon occupied, and he would want
that to end as soon as possible.

She dialed the number of her
house. The telephone rang once, twice, and then there was an
unfamiliar high-pitched tone. A recorded voice that sounded like a
middle-aged woman came on and stated authoritatively, “The
number you have reached is not in service. If you think you have
reached this number in error, please hang up and dial again.”
Linda took her advice.

After the third try, Linda began
to feel panicky and worried. Was it possible that in all this
traveling she had forgotten to pay a phone bill? Her mind searched
for a way to reassure itself, but it came back with nothing. She
weighed the danger of calling the long-distance operator in Los
Angeles and explaining the problem. She could think of no reason not
to, so she did. After a few seconds she was connected with the
billing department. The woman on the other end consulted a computer
and said, “You’re right. I’m seeing it as out of
service. It’s not a billing problem. I’ve already checked
your records, and you’re up to date on your payments. But the
phone is out of service.”

“Doesn’t whatever
you’re looking at say why?” asked Linda. “I’m
expecting a very important call, and if they can’t get through
I’m going to be a very unhappy customer.”

“I’m sorry,”
said the woman. “They don’t tell us what the problem is.
It could be a lot of things – a malfunction in the equipment in
your home, for instance. Or with the line that goes to your house. If
a tree on your property fell and pulled it down, I would have no way
of knowing from here.”

“Well, I certainly have no
way of knowing from here, do I?” asked Linda.

“I understand that,”
said the woman.

“Can’t you send
somebody to check?”

“Is there anyone there now
to let the repair technician onto the premises?” Linda could
tell it was an official question, the sort that brought some rule
into play.

“No.”

“Then we wouldn’t be
able to send anyone, no.”

Linda closed her eyes and let
her voice carry some of the frustration and defeat that she was
feeling. “If you were me, what would you do about this?”

Now that the woman had her
victory, she issued a reprisal. “When you go out of town it’s
a good idea to leave a key with a friend or relative. You might call
a neighbor and ask her to look across the street to see if there’s
anything obviously the matter.”

The defeat was complete. “Yes,
thanks,” she said. “Maybe I’ll try that. Good-bye.”
She hung up. Something was very wrong. She goaded her imagination to
think of a way to find out what it was from the other end of the
continent. She couldn’t call the police and have them check the
house, because what they might find would send her and Earl to jail.
She and Earl had always been so careful to remain unapproachable and
anonymous that she not only had no acquaintances among the people who
lived nearby, but she could not now recall any of their names.

She used her laptop computer to
call up the Los Angeles telephone directory Northwest section and
scanned it. Finally she called the number of a florist a half mile
from her house, ordered a dozen roses to be delivered to Linda
Thompson from Earl Bliss, and charged it to the Northridge Detectives
credit card number she retrieved from the memory of her computer. She
made it sound like an afterthought when she asked to talk to the
delivery driver. She heard the man turn his head away from the
receiver and shout, “Enrique! Phone!”

She explained to Enrique, “These
flowers are supposed to be a surprise, so it has to be done in a
certain way. It’s a house with a high gate. Drive up to the
gate. Ring the bell. If anyone is home, give them the flowers. If
nobody is home, there’s a great big mailbox right by the gate.
Put the flowers inside, so she finds them when she looks for her
mail. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” said
Enrique. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” said Linda.
“When will you be back from your deliveries?”

“About an hour from now.”

“Fine. I’ll call
you, because I need to know where you put the flowers. Okay?”

“Okay.”

A little over an hour later,
Linda called again and asked for Enrique. If a line was down, he
could hardly have avoided noticing it. If – God forbid –
there was a bigger problem, he would have seen something she could
interpret. If the time for killing Pete Hatcher had run out and the
one waiting in the house was Seaver, or if the house was under police
surveillance, somebody would have appeared at the gate to talk to the
delivery man. She waited for a minute and a half before Enrique
picked up the phone and said, “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t
deliver the flowers. The boss says he’ll cancel the order and
credit your card for the money.”