Poison Flower

She was so familiar with the east-west interstate highways that she noticed if a new sign for a restaurant or a hotel appeared where it hadn't been last trip. She had driven these night roads with exhausted, sleeping fugitives, staring at the mirrors every few seconds because any set of headlights that lingered in her wake too long might be death waiting for its best chance. She'd driven the same routes alone, pushing the road time and the speed, because an extra day of travel could mean a helpless victim would disappear forever. This time her eyes were usually fixed on the road ahead, and her mind was occupied with trying to move forward to the day when she would find Daniel Martel.

As Jane drove, she thought about Martel. He would be getting a bit anxious by now. He had sent out eight hired shooters to the place where he'd known Jane, and probably Shelby, would be, and the eight had simply vanished into silence. There were no news reports, no police investigations, no complaints of a disturbance. Jane was satisfied with that. She hoped the disappearance of his men kept Martel awake at night, and made him compulsively turn to look over his shoulder in daylight.

Driving back to Los Angeles meant putting herself in the one place where her breakout of Jim Shelby wasn't a distant event rapidly fading into memory. She was going to a city where any police officer might be actively watching for her. It was also Daniel Martel's country, not hers. The Adirondack Mountains where she had ambushed Martel's men were part of her ancestral world. She had been there many times since she was a child, and it was a place where she felt comfortable. Southern California was not part of that world. It was a hot, inhospitable place for her at this time of year, when the sky would turn clear like a gigantic, unchanging blue bowl, and the temperature might rise to 110. Los Angeles was a single suburb eighty miles north to south, and a hundred east to west, and Martel probably knew it better than she ever could.

Hunting him would mean stalking him from a distance. She stopped at a hotel in Phoenix. She began by going out to buy a computer in an Apple store and then going back to her room to begin her search. She began with Google and moved quickly to the tools she had developed to help place her runners. She signed out and then signed back in as a corporation she had invented about ten years earlier to provide work histories for her clients. She performed searches on Lexis and Nexis. In Lexis she found deeds and mortgages, motor vehicle registrations, and personal legal histories. He had never been convicted of a crime, never even been arrested. But he did have property.

He had a house in Los Angeles. That struck her as revealing. When he had lived with Susan Shelby in Los Angeles, it wasn't at his house. He had made her rent an apartment and moved in with her. He must have been expecting to do something that would get him into trouble. He had probably never told her his real name.

He also had a condominium in Las Vegas, which was his official residence. That made sense to her. He had some kind of business as a cover for selling prescription drugs diverted from legal distribution channels, and he seemed to have quite a bit of money. Nevada had no state income tax. There was a Porsche Carrera registered in Nevada, and a Mercedes 735 registered in California.

She found the mortgage he had taken out to buy the house in Los Angeles, and she almost cried out in frustration. He'd had to give his Social Security number, but it had been blacked out. That number would have given her access to his credit reports and his financial records and eventually would have told her where he was.

She still didn't have him. She had used the computer to get specific bits about him, like stakes to drive in a circle around him, the beginning of a definition. But she had not found a picture of him, had no certainty about where he was. Each time he could have made a mistake and been caught, he had avoided it and escaped. He had been supernaturally careful and thorough about removing all traces of himself from the apartment in Los Angeles he had shared with Jim Shelby's wife. In the apartment the police had found no fingerprints, no DNA traces. He had been nowhere near the building where Jane had been held and tortured, and nowhere near the house where his men had held Sarah Shelby. The underlings Jane might have used to connect him with crimes were dead.

Jane spent some time organizing and studying the information she had found about him, then teased it to make it more useful. She used aerial maps and surface photographs to get pictures of his house and his condo and the streets on all sides of them. She got more aerial photos for each hour of the day or night, and signed into traffic cameras that were permanently trained on the major thoroughfares nearby.

She used the driver's license numbers to bring up replicas of his actual licenses so she could see his photographs. He had thick, dark hair; a smooth, unlined face; and large, light blue eyes. She wasn't surprised that he was handsome. He had gone to Austin with confidence that he would have no trouble meeting and manipulating a woman he only expected must exist-a pharmaceutical saleswoman who worked at the nearby company headquarters. According to the licenses, he was tall-six feet two inches-and he weighed 180 pounds. She could see from the photos that he was trim, with big shoulders and chest. It was a body acquired not by playing some game, but by consciously shaping with weights and repetitive exercises. His skin was evenly tanned. It had been done not by being outdoors in some active way, but more likely by using a tanning bed. He controlled his appearance like an actor.

She studied the pictures of his face until she was sure she could recognize it even if he added something to change his appearance-a beard, glasses, mustache, hair dye. Then she packed her clothes, computer, and guns into the car, and drove toward Los Angeles. All of the men he had sent after her had been carrying California driver's licenses.

Jane was heading for a city where she had committed the crime of the year. Before she left Phoenix, she stopped in a wig shop and bought three wigs. One was light brown with natural-looking highlights, one was darker brown with a hint of red, and one was short and blond. She knew from experience that she could get away with even light blond hair with her blue eyes, but the wig made her look very different. In another shop she bought two pairs of sunglasses, one that wrapped around her face, and one with big saucer-shaped dark lenses that made her face look small.

As she drove the last hundred miles to Los Angeles on Route 10, she thought about the ways of getting to Daniel Martel. When she reached Santa Monica she took her Camry to a Toyota dealer and told the service manager to do all of the checks, replacements, and maintenance it would take to make the car into one he would buy his daughter. When she picked it up a day later, she filled the tank and had the car washed and waxed. She knew that a dirty car caught people's attention in Los Angeles, and made it look as though the driver had just blown in from elsewhere.

She drove to the neighborhood in west Los Angeles where Daniel Martel's house was. She spent over an hour driving around the area before she swung past his address for the first time. His house was a two-story Spanish-style building with a red tile roof and a balcony with an ornate wrought-iron railing. She could see signs on the lawn for a security company, and a few decals on the lower windows and front door.

Jane returned to her hotel and laid out a set of dark clothes, a baseball cap, more of the surgical gloves she had used for cleaning, about fifty feet of the rope she had brought to the house in the Adirondacks, her folding knife, and her two identical Beretta M92 pistols.

At two a.m. Jane drove past Daniel Martel's house, parked a block away, and walked back to the house. She stepped around the outside, peering in windows. There was an alarm keypad that she could see beside the front door, but she could also see that the display said, "RDY": ready. It was not turned on. Did that mean he was at home, that he was in there waiting for her There were no lights on, and there was no car in the garage. She wondered if it meant that he had no fear of a break-in, or that he had known she would be coming but didn't want the security system to summon anyone. She decided it probably meant he wanted her to find her way in.

She continued around the house, looking inside. She knew she could break a window, reach a latch, and slip inside without worrying about the alarm going off. If he was gone, that would be safe, but she sensed something was wrong. She picked up a fallen branch from beneath a tree in the yard, cleaned it of twigs, tied her rope around it, stood to the side of the balcony, and threw it over both railings so it dangled free on the other side without hitting anything and making noise. She reached up and removed the stick, tied the two parts of the rope into a slipknot, tugged it to tighten it, and began to climb. As she did, she used her arms more than usual to save her right leg. When she was just below the balcony she reached up, clutched the edge, and pulled herself up to grasp the railing. She braced her left foot against the wall of the house, used the railing to climb up, and stepped over it onto the concrete surface of the balcony. Then she pulled the rope to bring the knot up to her, untied it, drew up the rest of the rope, and left it coiled on the balcony where it wouldn't be seen from below.

She leaned close to the double doors on the balcony and stared in at the master suite. There was a king bed with gauzy covers and two long pillows. She moved to look from the left side of the left door along the wall to the closed bedroom door, then beyond it toward the right, when she saw the spring gun aimed at the inner side of the bedroom door on the far side of the room from her.

It was a pump shotgun set up on a table using a bench rest designed for zeroing in a rifle at a range. There was a thin wire running across the closed bedroom door, through an eyebolt screwed into the woodwork on the wall beside the door, through another one in the wall behind the shotgun, then attached to a piece of wood set inside the trigger guard just in front of the trigger. When the door opened, the shotgun would blast the intruder at the height of the table, about thirty inches above the floor. For someone standing upright, the blast would hit the lower abdomen. It was a prolonged, painful death.

Jane stayed at the double door on the balcony studying the room to spot signs of more traps. She saw nothing, so she slid the blade of her knife between the two doors, lifted the latch, then stepped aside and placed her back to the wall before she tugged the right door open.

She remained still and listened. There was no gunshot, no sound of an alarm system, no low growl of a dog that he'd locked in. She leaned in far enough to see all sides, but kept her feet planted until she was sure there was no threat in this room but the spring gun. She stepped carefully to the shotgun, clicked the safety in so the red stripe disappeared, removed the piece of wood from the trigger guard, and let the wire go slack.

The spring gun had been aimed at the closed door that led out of the bedroom to the hallway. She stepped to the door and listened. She stepped back a pace. Something was wrong. There was no sound out there. Nobody was on the other side waiting for her, but she sensed that the spring gun she had disarmed couldn't be all. That wasn't the way this man thought. He was a murderer who had framed his victim's husband for the murder and then tried to get him killed in prison. One strike, one murder, one trap would not be enough for him.

As she thought, she knew what it must be. There would be a second spring gun in the hallway, aimed at the outside of the bedroom door. If she entered the bedroom through the balcony doors, as she had, she would see the spring gun in the bedroom and disarm it, and then confidently open the door. The second spring gun, the one in the hallway that she had never imagined, would go off and kill her. If instead she had entered the house another way and come along the hallway toward the bedroom door, she would disarm the spring gun in the hallway and then be killed by the one trained on the door from inside the bedroom. It was a simple, elegant way to build a booby trap: disarming the first gun didn't make you safe; it made you only a confident victim of the second.

She used her knife to unscrew the doorknob and remove it from the inside, then pushed the outer knob out of its hole and let it fall to the floor in the hall.

Through the circular hole where the doorknob had been mounted, she could see the dimly lit hallway. Exactly as she had predicted, there was a second table with a shotgun mounted on a bench rest, aimed at her. She followed the trip wire with her eyes. It ran from the piece of wood in the trigger guard to an eyebolt screwed into the surface of the table behind the shotgun, and then straight to the bedroom door. Since the door opened inward, any attempt to open it would pull the trigger and kill the person coming out of the bedroom.

Jane studied the spot where the wire led to the door, then worked with her knife to carve away the wood from that part of the door. It was taking time, but Jane had already determined that Daniel Martel wasn't here. If he showed up now, she would hear his car through the open balcony doors. She kept working until her blade scraped the screw end of the eyebolt. When she freed the bolt from the door, she heard a clink. She put her eye to the hole and saw the bolt and the slack trip wire on the floor.

She pulled the door open and walked to the shotgun. She pushed the safety on and continued down the hall. There were four more bedrooms up here, but none of them had any furniture. There were just polished hardwood floors and spotless white walls.

Because stairways were easy places to plant booby traps, Jane used great care in descending to the first floor. She kept her feet on the outer edges of the stairs, where she could see what she was stepping on. When she reached the bottom, she found an insulated wire and followed it to a pressure pad Martel had installed under the runner on one of the steps.

She could feel the man's mind at work. He had a problem. He had murdered a woman and framed the woman's husband. The husband was always the easiest one to get the police to accept, because most female murder victims were killed by male family members or friends. Probably Martel had always planned to have the husband murdered in prison, because as long as the framed man was alive, someone might take a second look at the crime. When Jane had taken Jim Shelby away from him, he had sent eight men after her, and this must have struck him as no more than prudent. She had buried the eight, and disappeared again. Clearly he was now aware that she was coming for him, and he was retreating and leaving booby traps in his wake, not staying to wait for her.

She searched, moving methodically through Daniel Martel's house from room to room, opening all the spaces where things might be hidden. She searched for photographs of Daniel Martel. She searched for medicines in the cabinets that might indicate a chronic illness or an addiction. She examined the figurative paintings to see whether any of the landscapes might be pleasant places he had visited once and might return to if he felt he had to lie low for a period of time.

When she had been everywhere on the ground floor, she climbed the stairs again to look in the master suite. She opened the walk-in closet and the lights went on auto-matically. The poles where clothes were hung had been disarranged, with some clothes taken and the other hangers pushed to the sides. She studied the clothes that remained to see whether he had been searching through the cold-weather clothes, taken hiking boots or beach sandals, taken expensive suits and shoes or left them. To her it appeared that he had left out the extremes. Judging from the locations of the empty hangers, he had apparently taken something from the jeans section, several shirts, a couple of sport coats, and a windbreaker or light jacket. The shoes were in rows of small cubbyholes. There seemed to be a pair of sneakers or running shoes gone, and a pair of dress shoes, probably brown, since that was the color of the others in that row.

She pushed some hangers aside. There was a compartment built into the back wall. It wasn't a safe, just a doorless cabinet that must have been hidden by a set of shelves on rollers that he had pushed aside. She looked inside to see if she could determine what he had chosen to take. There was an empty envelope with the return address of the West Valley Bank printed on it, the kind a teller would offer if you withdrew too much cash to carry in a pocket. There was a second envelope, this one with the return address of the county clerk in Dayton, Ohio. The name of the addressee had apparently been typed on a sticker, and it had been torn off. The receipt inside said that it was for a duplicate of a birth certificate, but not the name of the baby. There was another envelope that was from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and said, "Do Not Forward." It had to be a credit card he'd ordered in a false name.

He was running, and that put him in a world she knew better than he did.

She took her rope from the balcony, closed the doors, went down the stairs, and stepped across the never-occupied living room and out the front door. When she reached her car, she started it and drove to the first freeway entrance and turned north. At this hour, it would only take a few minutes to reach the 101 freeway, and then the junction with the 134. In an hour she'd be nearly to the edge of the desert at Victorville, and she would be in Las Vegas by morning.

19.

Daniel Martel seemed to Jane to be someone who went to some trouble to be unreadable. His house in Los Angeles wasn't a home; it was an investment. It had expensive paintings but no books, no old clothes, no magazines, no computer, and no personal effects. It was a place for him to stay while he was in Los Angeles without having to be visible or sign a hotel register. It was also a place to store some of his wealth. And real estate was the easiest commodity to manipulate-to give equal credibility to either a big profit or a big loss, whichever he wanted. Martel had apparently never before been close enough to danger to need to run. But Martel was cagey, cunning.

He'd had enough imagination to foresee the possibility that if he kept making money through criminal acts, he might someday have to run. Maybe when he was with Susan Shelby, he had seen in her whatever quality it was that ultimately had made him kill her, and prepared. Maybe she was a talker, who might reveal his business. It might have been as simple as Susan getting irritating, and Martel beginning to think about what beginning a future without her might require. Jane was aware that Martel was psychologically sophisticated. His simple booby trap had been dangerous because it displayed acute attention to how the human mind worked.

But he was still a novice at running. He had not had time to think through the predicament of a runner and invent strategies for each obstacle. He would drive to Las Vegas-almost certainly, he had done so as soon as he'd realized his hired men must be dead-and collect whatever he thought he needed. The Las Vegas condominium would be another place for Jane to learn more about him.

She rechecked the two Beretta pistols she was carrying, put one in her jacket, and put the other under the seat. She drove as fast as she could without attracting the police. The drive to Las Vegas was a long roller coaster-an incline that rose five thousand feet to the Cajon Pass, then a descent into the edge of Death Valley at sea level again, then a couple of smaller ups and downs, ending at two thousand feet on the Las Vegas Strip. She was driving outside the fence past the taxiway at McCarron Airport when the sun rose. The look of everything-blinding and sun-bleached with a promise of cruel heat just outside the car window-reminded her of the morning only a few weeks ago when she'd been wounded, alone on foot with no money, no food, no water, no name. Things were so different now that as the two impressions merged, she felt stronger and more determined.

She knew approximately where Daniel Martel's condominium was. The address included the name Silverstrike Club, and she remembered seeing a building with that name on it just east of the Strip. She looked it up on her laptop and saw that it was between a midsize hotel and a nightclub. There were a couple of pools and a nine-hole golf course behind it.

The problem was going to be getting inside to the upper floors where the condominiums were. Las Vegas was an island in a river of cash, so it was full of people who had come to steal. It was, consequently, also heavily populated with security technicians, guards, rent-a-cops, and others whose job it was to prevent incursions by the thieves. It would be best to assume she was always under surveillance.

There was little time for the things she would have to accomplish here, so she started immediately. She drove to the hotel beside the Silverstrike Club, checked in wearing her short blond wig, and then went out shopping for a dress. The Forum at Caesar's was close, and at its heart was a collection of high-end stores for women. She spent an hour finding the right dress, purse, and shoes, and returned to her hotel with enough time to take extraordinary pains with her hair, makeup, and accessories.

She was a bit thinner than she had been when she'd gone to get Jim Shelby out of the courthouse, so she supposed she looked more appealing by Las Vegas standards than she had before she'd been shot and starved. Before she left the room, she made sure the marks that Wylie and his friends had made on her were hidden by her long sleeves and high neckline.

As she walked the two hundred feet to the front entrance of the Silverstrike Club, she could feel the drying and tightening as the surface moisture of her skin was seared away by the sun. The white building was about twenty stories high with a broad, roofed-over drive in front like the gigantic hotels on the Strip. Jane stepped inside, heard the automatic door swing closed behind her, and felt the refrigerated air embrace her. The lobby was an empty marble cavern except for a wide concierge desk with a woman in a man's sport coat standing behind it. Jane approached and said, "Hello."

"Good afternoon." The girl was as well trained and disciplined as an acrobat. Her smile was an artful blend of dental bleaching techniques and willpower. "How can I help you this afternoon"

"I'm supposed to meet Mr. Martel for lunch at one. Can you please call him for me"

"Of course." The voice was lilting. There was nothing in the range of human activities that she would rather do. She punched numbers with a fingernail manicured by a nameless artist. Next came the moment when the eagerness was replaced by uncertainty. She hung up. "He's not answering." She had already filed this incident in the archives of thoughtless errors men commit. Her left eyebrow gave a twitch of commiseration. "Would you like to wait for him in the bar"

Jane looked only mildly surprised by his absence, but certainly not ready to disregard the slight. She glanced at her watch with the eye of a prosecutor silently building a case: the time was now entered into the official record. "Well, all right," she said, as though the outcome had been anything but sure.

"I'll take you there." The girl was around the counter and gliding across the marble floor, so Jane had to move quickly to keep up. The girl reached the door a half step ahead so she could push it open before Jane's progress could be impeded. They entered a space with a large dining room on the left, and a long bar on the right with a liveried bartender wielding a cocktail shaker before a couple of men in polo shirts and shorts.

Just inside the door was another perfected young woman at a lectern. The concierge whispered something about "Mr. Martel" and "bar." The hostess was launched a few steps toward the bar, turned her head only, and held her hand out to Jane. "I'll watch for him and let him know where you are."

"Thank you," Jane said. She sat at a small metal table in the bar and took her phone out. She pretended to look down into the display at e-mails or text messages, but she had pressed the button for "camera" and was using the viewer to study the men in the vicinity. There were only about a dozen in the bar, but all of them had taken a moment to watch the concierge, the hostess, and Jane. That was fairly promising.

As she studied the room through her phone, she thought about what she should do if it all went wrong-if Daniel Martel suddenly walked in. There was no chance he could get across the lobby without being reminded by the concierge that he had a date waiting. The ladies' room was at the end of the space, to the right of the bar. She would probably be able to head into that hallway and follow it all the way to the other side, where the restrooms would be accessible to the dining room. The door to the kitchen was in the same direction, a little farther on. She could slip in, go down the long aisle that was always in the center for waiters to pick up orders, and be out the back door before he had any idea what to do.

The waiter appeared at her table, and Jane looked up and said, "May I have an iced tea, please"

He had barely had time to step away before a new man replaced him, standing above her. "Hi," he said. "Are you waiting for somebody"

He didn't appear to have been out golfing or swimming. His summer-weight sport coat and jeans could have been work attire in an informal office, but his T-shirt and sandals could not, and his Patek Philippe watch raised the question of whether work was necessary. He was handsome, but in a way that was too old for the way he dressed. She decided to take a chance rather than wait for another one. "Well, I have been waiting, but I'm beginning to wonder whether I should. Being late is manipulative. If I put in the time and effort to wait much longer, I'll have to persuade myself that he was worth it. Then I'll have to be willing to devote more time and effort to him."

"He sounds very sophisticated."

"It's not working. I'm just getting irritated."

He shrugged. "Anger is a passion, and it makes your blood circulate and starts you thinking about him. That's much better than indifference."

"Not if you want to get laid this year instead of next."

He threw his head back and laughed. "Good point." He took a fake step away, then stopped, as they both had known he would. He looked back. "If you'd prefer some company while you wait, you might make him jealous."

"I may as well inflict whatever pain I can. Have a seat."

He sat at the small table with her, gave a half wave to the waiter, and, while the waiter approached, said, "Is that iced tea"

She nodded.

"Two Long Island iced teas." To Jane he said, "You like to trade up, don't you"

Jane said, "Thanks, but four kinds of liquor and sweet and sour mix"

"It's just your iced tea's more fun-loving sister."

"No alcohol."

He nodded, and the waiter disappeared. "So what's your name"

"Tina Guilford. And you"

"Rick Chambers." He held his hand out, and when she shook it, he held on a half second too long.

She freed her hand. "Pleased to meet you. Do you golf here"

"Not often," he said. "And never in the summer. It's a hundred and six out there. By three it'll be a hundred and ten. I mostly just live here."

"Do you like it"

"Sure. It's a block from the Strip. It's got all the amenities, and the view in every direction is fantastic. It's safe from random people wandering in and out whenever they please. Not like the big hotels."

"I never got the idea they were unsafe."

"They're not, actually. But do you want all the people you see walk in their doors to walk into yours"

"I suppose not." She looked at her watch.

"Are you hungry"

"Well, to be honest with you, he did ask me here for lunch."

"It's getting to be mid-afternoon. Come on. Let's get a table." He leaned forward, his hands on the table as though he were about to push off.

"No, I don't want to impose. I'll just finish my tea and order lunch for myself."

"You're out of luck, Tina, honey. This is a private club. You can't pay for your iced tea, let alone lunch. We're too snobby to use money. It goes on a tab. Please. I'm hungry, too. I'll sit here and suffer with you if you want, just because you're beautiful. But it would be much nicer to watch you eat lunch."

She looked at the hostess, visibly uncomfortable. Then she smiled at him. "I'll take you up on your kind offer. You're a true gentleman."

"It's just my upbringing, and when I find a beautiful woman at my mercy I overcome that pretty quickly." He waved at the waiter and said, "We'd like a table in the dining room, please."

They went into the dining room, which was still well populated, and ordered. They ate and had a pleasant, unhurried conversation. Jane kept steering the conversation away from the way she looked, and moved her arm twice because he had the habit of laying his hand on it for emphasis. When they'd been there for nearly an hour, she said, "Well, I guess he's not going to show up at all, and he lives here."

"What's his name"

"Today, it's Fool. But he'll still be calling himself David Cavendish."

"If he comes in now, please don't make a scene. I'm too much of a coward for a fistfight."

"Do you know him"

"I don't think so. But he sounds Scottish. Probably throws the caber and drinks his single malt neat, and all that."

"Pretty close. I'm picturing him in a kilt now. This would be a better climate for a kilt than Scotland."

"Too much wind off the desert. It's the only show in town nobody would pay to see."

A few minutes later, she determined it was time to force him to decide whether to commit himself. "This was a lot of fun, Rick. I really enjoyed our lunch. You turned what started as a horrible day into a nice one."

"Oh, we can't just end it here. You were curious about the club. Let me show you around."

"I don't want to waste your afternoon."

"Afternoon is nothing. Half the people in town are asleep waiting for night. Come on." He came around behind her to pull out her chair, then led her out the far door that led to the residential part of the building. There was another door, and he used a key card to open it. Jane felt a blast of heat, but stepped into it after him.

"Out here is the pool I like best. Over here, by the jungle." There was a thick barrier of sago palms, elephant ears, and flowering plants. The pool was a complicated shape with waterfalls and grottoes that opened onto some other part of the pool she didn't see. The impression was of a place apart, somewhere other than the desert. "Very pretty."

"The golf course is up that way, and the tennis courts are over there. You can follow the ambulances picking up the sunstroke cases."

He opened the door again with his key card, and stepped to the elevator. He pressed the "up" button.

"Where to now"

"You've got to see the view from the upper floors." When the doors slid aside he stepped in, pushed "18," and swiped his card on the reader beside the panel. The elevator rose. Jane followed him out on the eighteenth floor to a door marked 1829. "Here," he said. "Look the other way, and prepare for a sight."

Jane covered her face with her hands and looked up and down the corridor to spot the security cameras. She didn't see any. He pushed the door open, then said, "Now look."

She stepped across a symbolic expanse of marble into the large living room. In the floor-to-ceiling windows were the backs and sides of the hotels on the east side of the Strip-MGM and Venetian, Paris-and on the west side she saw the facades of Mandalay Bay Luxor, Caesar's Palace, Bellagio, Mirage. "This is absolutely breathtaking," she said.

"I love it. I'm glad I got to show it to you."

"I am, too."

"Now take a look on this side." He opened a door and they walked into a room that was a sort of den, but had a desk with papers on it. The big window in this one was on the other side, and looked out onto the dry hardpan and distant mountains.

"That's incredible, too," she said. "But it doesn't look any more real than the other side."

"Let's have a drink," he said. "You have to keep hydrated around here, or you fall over and get stepped on."

"What do you have"

"Nonalcoholic"

"Not necessarily."

"How about a nice, icy vodka martini"

"Well, okay."

"Great. I'll make them."

She followed him through the living room to a counter that was near the entrance to the kitchen. He took two martini glasses and walked off to put them in the freezer. He took the shaker and ice and poured in the touch of vermouth. She saw him shake and pour off the vermouth, pour in the vodka, then begin to shake it. As he shook it, he went back to the kitchen with the shaker, took out the two iced glasses, and walked across her line of vision to an angle she couldn't see. He returned with the two martinis, smiling. He handed her one, clinked his glass against hers, and said, "To serendipity."

He tipped his glass back, and Jane raised hers. She saw that the stems of the two glasses had small metal rings around them. His was a silvery color, like platinum, and hers was gold with a little ruby on it. She touched the glass to her lips and turned her head to survey the windows again. The rings were obviously part of a set that people attached to guests' glasses at parties so they could identify their own drinks and not take someone else's. "That's a nice martini," she said.

"I'm glad you like it," he said. "Anybody can make a good second martini. It's the first one that's hard, while people can still taste them."

She looked at the far hallway. "I think I noticed your bathroom on the tour. Can you excuse me, please"

"Sure. Right down there."

She wanted to take her glass with her and pour it out, but that wasn't normal. He would suspect she knew. She set the martini down on the counter, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. The rings had not been on the glass stems when he'd taken them to the freezer. Why would he put those rings on the glasses this time There were only two of them. And did it really matter It wasn't as though the drinks were different but looked the same. They were the same, exactly. Only they weren't. They couldn't be.

Jane looked around her for a solution. She spotted a dispenser on the wall of the bathroom that held paper cups. She flushed the toilet, and then ran the water while she pulled two cups out, put them into her purse, and left the bathroom.

He wasn't visible. His drink was on the counter with hers, but he was gone. There must be a second bathroom. She poured her drink into the two little paper cups, poured his drink into her glass, and poured the paper cups into his glass. As she lifted her glass and took a sip from it, her eyes rose and saw him coming from the kitchen. Without thinking about it, she realized he had used the moment to get rid of the concoction-the chloral hydrate, Rohypnol, GHB, whatever he used-just in case she went in there. Or maybe one of the times he'd done this before, he had forgotten to hide it before he carried the girl into the bedroom, and forever after he was worried about his own competence. He smiled, snatched up his drink, and took a large gulp. "You're right. That's good."

He walked into the living room and sat on the couch. She came and sat near him. He looked closely at her as he said, "So, Tina. What do you do"

"I'm a loan officer for a bank." She smiled. "That's why I've got time for an extra little unpaid vacation this summer. We're hardly making any loans, so they're happy to let anybody who wants to take time."

"Sounds good. And bad, of course."

"How about you"

"I'm good, too, and bad."

"I meant your job."

"I'm semiretired. I was one of the people who put up money for this place, and we made quite a profit, so I don't really need to punch a clock."

"That must be nice."

"I thought it would be," he said. "I thought that I'd have a good life. I had a wife, and some kids. The kids were already out of college, and my wife and I had planned to travel and have a great time after I quit the contracting business. But I never seemed to be able to get there. Finally, this place got finished, and I came home one day and said, `I've retired.' She said, `That's odd.' I said, `What do you mean, odd' She said, `I've just filed for divorce.'"

"Really I'm so sorry."

"She was right, though. It was odd." He was getting tired, having a hard time keeping his eyes open. "We lived in California, which is a community property state. She took half the money and left. But I still have enough." He stared at her for a moment. "You did something to my drink, didn't you"

"Did I"

He lowered his head. "I'm sorry."

"That's a really creepy thing to do," she said. "You could go to jail for the rest of your life." She took the Beretta pistol out of her purse, then pressed it against his temple. "Or you could run into somebody who woke up mad enough to kill you for it."

His eyes widened, but then a moment later the chloral hydrate overcame even his alarm. His head tilted back on the top of the couch and his body seemed to melt into it. He began to snore.

Jane listened to him for a few seconds, and decided his breathing was strong enough to keep him alive, and wasn't getting any weaker. She hadn't originally planned to do anything to Rick; she just intended to have him use his key card on the elevator. She would pretend to go toward the lobby, then stop the elevator on the fifteenth floor and get out. She rolled him slightly to the side and reached into his pocket, then pulled out his key card.

She went into the kitchen and searched the cabinets and drawers until she found a small brown unlabeled plastic bottle with pills inside. She poured the pills out into the garbage disposal, ground them up, and ran the water for a minute to be sure they got out into the drain.

Jane took a last look around. She wiped off the two glasses, the doorknob and faucets in the bathroom, and the plastic pill bottle, and took the two paper cups with her. She checked on Rick again. He was breathing steadily, if noisily.

She remembered that he had told her he'd been one of the developers of the building. Would this man give up all that control Wouldn't he hold on to just a remnant of it, even if it was only a symbol She rolled him onto his side and took his wallet from his back pocket. She looked among the credit cards and found the second key card she'd been looking for. The first one bore a photograph of the building. This one was plain gold with the silver letters Silverstrike Construction. She looked out the peephole in the door, then opened it and left.

She walked to the elevator, stepped in, used Rick's key card to activate it, and rode it down to the fifteenth floor. When she got out, she used the card again and sent the elevator back up to the eighteenth floor. She didn't want it to arrive on the ground floor, open, and reveal itself to be empty.

She looked both ways and saw that the hallway was deserted. She kept her head down, because she assumed she was being taped. She stopped at Martel's door; tried Rick's key card in the lock; saw, as she'd expected, that it wouldn't work; and put it away. Then she took out the second key card, the one she had found in his wallet, and inserted it into the lock, then pulled it out. The little light shone green and she heard a click. She was right: Rick had retained a master key. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

After all of her effort, she was inside Daniel Martel's condominium. She stood still and looked in every direction. She didn't want to come all this way and get killed by another one of his booby traps. She studied the big living room. It was the same layout as Rick's, and she saw no alterations that would hide a booby trap. The door sign indicated that he had a maid service come in to clean, and he could hardly have warned the service about any booby trap. He must have been counting on the regular security system of the club to keep everyone out of this place.

She could see he had the same built-in cabinetry Rick had, the same furniture facing the same tall windows. But the paintings on the walls were peculiar. They were stylized nearly naked showgirls that seemed to be taller than a man and menacing, with emaciated white-painted faces accented by collagen-puffed, bloodred lips and bared teeth. Their cheeks had round smears of rouge that were almost clownish. The eyes were luminous and cruel, like the eyes of the big cats in animal trainers' acts. They had the quality of unmasked falsehood, yet still grinned with triumph over the viewer like vampires caught with their fangs showing. She could feel the hatred of women that had inspired every feature.

Jane put on her gloves and began to open drawers and cabinets, searching for all of the things that would give her more information about Martel. She moved into his bedroom. That was where burglars looked first, because it was the place most likely to contain valuables. The bedroom was painted dark gray, and it had two sets of curtains that could shut out all light from outside. The bed was a California king with a fake fur bedspread and silk sheets. Six pillows were piled on it at the head.

She opened the drawers of the nightstands. The one farthest from the door held a box of .45 ammunition, but no gun. The other held two pairs of handcuffs and a blindfold. She closed it, and the sense of foreboding she'd felt since she'd arrived intensified. It might be nothing. There were plenty of people who played games with those things, and it meant nothing about their lives. But Daniel Martel was a murderer, someone she knew had already killed a woman. How could it not mean anything She found herself staring at the bed. It had a steel head piece and foot piece with vertical bars. Some of the bars looked as though the paint had been marred by something scraping on them.

The closet door was on the other side of the bedroom. It was a walk-in the size of a second bedroom. There was a chest-high island in the middle, and the walls were covered with drawers, cabinets, and poles with hangers. Of course Daniel Martel would be unusually interested in his appearance; he made money seducing foolish women. She closed the closet door, but there was a full-length mirror on the back of the door, and she kept catching her own reflection in it, so she opened it again.

The clothes on hangers had been pushed to one side so there was a section that was bare in the middle. She opened the drawers on the wall to her right, and saw that some of them had been emptied.

The island in the center of the room kept drawing her eye. It was a chest-high rectangle about seven feet long and four feet wide, with drawers on all sides. She opened a few drawers. A couple near the top contained accessories-cuff links, watches, sunglasses, rings, an ID bracelet. Others had socks and underwear still in packages. But she soon lost interest in what was in the drawers. The most intriguing thing about them was their size. They were wide, but they weren't deep enough from front to back. Behind them, inside the center of the island, there had to be a long empty space. She tugged on one of the drawers to pull it free, but it wouldn't come out. She studied the island, ran her fingers under the overhanging top surface, and then knelt and looked up at it. There was a pair of hinges on one side. She walked to the opposite side, found the catch, and pushed it. The top opened like a chest.

In the center of the island, between the drawers, was a rectangular box like a tray. Stored in it were four pistols with extra magazines, two boot knives, a couple of knives that could be opened with a flick of the thumb, two electronic stun guns, and a short Japanese sword designed for fighting in close quarters. She lifted the tray out and set it on the floor, then looked in the tray below it.

There were bundles of letters and three photograph albums. She picked up the first stack of letters and leafed quickly through it, looking at the envelopes. Then she did the same with each of the others. The letters were in different handwriting, from several different people, sent to him at a succession of addresses. But all had been mailed in Indianapolis, Indiana.

She took up the first of the photograph albums. There was a shot of a man about thirty-five to forty years old, with a handsome face. It was Martel. He had longer hair than seemed stylish at the moment, but the picture might be old. On the next page, there he was again in a tuxedo, with an attractive woman with long, shiny blond hair wearing a strapless gown and holding a matching clutch. She was a stereotype, a trophy girlfriend at some big event.

Jane turned the page and saw them both again. The woman had her wrists and ankles tied to a bed, and she was bent over a pile of pillows. There was a gag in her mouth. She seemed to be in genuine distress, not posing or pretending. Sitting at the head of the bed near her was Daniel Martel again, as naked as she was, but smiling. He held a leather belt in one hand. Jane turned the next page, and then the next, and the next. Daniel Martel was a sadist. All the photos were of him and a succession of women, and all of them involved some kind of bondage. In a few of the photographs they were in the midst of intercourse, but even then, the woman would be restrained somehow, while Martel was merely naked, always smiling for the camera. The smiling pose reminded her of a snapshot of a fisherman on a dock standing beside the hoist where his prize tarpon hung.

She took the two photograph albums and the letters from Indianapolis. She lifted out the tray and found the other thing she had been waiting for-financial papers. She found a tax return and copied his Social Security number. Then she returned the three trays to the island, closed the top, and went back through the bedroom and living room to the door.

In the hallway she used Rick's key card to operate the ele-vator, and rode it to the lobby. She walked out of the club, returned to her hotel room, and quickly began to pack. She wanted to be far from Las Vegas before Rick woke up. As she prepared to put Martel's letters into her suitcase with the albums, she opened the top one and looked at the signature. "Love, Mom," it said. "P.S. We can't wait to see you on the 25th. Let us know if we should get your old room ready." Jane looked at the postmark. The letter was only six days old.

20.

As Jane drove toward the east, the sun behind her illuminated everything so brightly that it seemed to glow against the blue of the sky. Within a few hours the sun sank, and she was propelling herself into empty night. She had spent only one day in Las Vegas and had left without sleeping there. Probably Daniel Martel had not dared to spend a night there, either. He had simply stopped to pick up a few things, and then had driven on toward Indianapolis.

She spent four days and nights driving and thinking about what she was doing. For most of her adult life, she had tried to guide her runners away from spots that had become dangerous to new, safe places. She had never encouraged her runners to stand and fight. She had taught them to be rabbits, and shown them how to run from the hounds that were hunting them. Each time she succeeded, the hounds failed, and the rabbits got to live another day. This time would be different. This time, when the hound plunged into the next hole expecting to sink his teeth into the rabbit, he was going to find out that a hole didn't always harbor a rabbit. Once in a while what was down there was something that bit back.

When she reached Indianapolis she drove around the city a bit, trying to get a feel for the area. It was like a lot of other cities in the Midwest, a small central area of tall buildings all jutting upward like a set of teeth, surrounded by a wide circle of one- and two-story buildings stretching outward like ripples in all directions, fading into suburbs.

Daniel Martel's mother had written to him on an occasional but consistent basis. She mentioned his father regularly, and a few people who seemed to be friends and neighbors, but there didn't seem to be any siblings. Jane searched for the address on the envelopes as she explored. It was on Meridien Street.

The houses on both sides of Meridien were large, set back on big pieces of land that had been planted and cultivated into lush gardens and vast lawns that looked as though they had been laid down by golf course greenkeepers. The architecture was mainly copied from the British gentry, much as it was in rich neighborhoods in other cities. There was the usual riot of Tudor and Georgian and a few neoclassical mansions, but the American federalist period and the modern didn't seem to offer anything grand enough.

When she found the correct house number she drove past, scanning it hastily. It seemed to be much like the others. It was three stories high, a Tudor with a steep roof and chimneys on either end. There were thick-trunked old hardwood trees on the lawns and somewhere in the back, serving as witnesses and guarantors of the antiquity of the building. There was a stone fence that separated the house from the next on each side, with exactly the right number and kinds of climbing plants on it-some rambling roses, a few climbers with white or yellow flowers.

She tried to get a look at the cars, in the hope of spotting Daniel Martel's Porsche or his Mercedes, but the driveway was like the one at the McKinnon house in Amherst, New York, where she lived with her husband, Carey. It ran straight back until it was past the house and then turned and went out of sight. She thought she could pick out the corner of an old carriage house converted to a garage like hers and Carey's, but it could have been something else.

Meridien continued through some small, elegant enclaves and out into suburbs where the big houses tended to sprawl at ground level on lots that could have accommodated cornfields, and probably once had.

Jane needed to find a way to keep watch on the Martel house without being caught at it. The problem was that wealthy neighborhoods were generally watched by many unseen eyes, some of them natural and others electronic. Strangers were not especially welcome unless they had specific, useful business there. It was possible to be arrested going for a walk in some cities if you couldn't prove you were there to offer some service to a specific resident.

She drove to her hotel and turned on her computer. She got an aerial view of Martel's parents' neighborhood, and then a ground-level view from the streets on all sides, and studied them to find a good way to get close. Under her business name, she ran another credit check on Daniel Martel using his Las Vegas address and the Social Security number she'd found on his tax return.

There was nothing in the credit record yet to indicate he had arrived in Indianapolis. She guessed this meant that he was traveling the way she did and was using cash and credit cards in a false name. It was possible that since he'd arrived in Indianapolis his parents had been paying for everything, so there was no record that he'd spent any money.

She arrived in the back yard of the house on Meridien at four in the morning, while the world was still dark. She climbed a neighbor's wall and walked along a dry ditch that had apparently been constructed to channel rain runoff from the yards to the next street. She had seen it on the aerial imagery on her computer. She used it to get to the rear of the Martel yard. She wanted to be comfortably settled and able to watch before the first person in the household awoke.

The first one was a woman servant, who turned on the light in a third-floor window at five, and then turned it off a few minutes later and appeared in the kitchen as cook. She was wearing a dress that wasn't quite a uniform, but was designed for work. It was light blue with a white collar and cuffs and buttoned up the front. Jane watched her in the kitchen making coffee, laying out food on serving platters, and doing other chores that Jane couldn't see well. She went into the dining room and set the table.

At six thirty the father came down the stairs and into the dining room. He wore khaki pants, a belt of military webbing with a gold buckle, brown leather shoes, and a blue shirt. The wife was down a minute or two later, wearing a dress that appeared to be light silk with a pattern of blue and white like Delft china. These were people of the last generation, but they had the air of an earlier generation.

She felt a small tug of sympathy for them. She wondered if there was a hidden feeling of doom because they had raised a murderer and were trying to keep from knowing it. Either way, they betrayed no evidence that they weren't delighted with their lives.

The mother had apparently been a beauty when she was young. She was still straight and slim, and her summer dress had a flow and a dignity that showed she was used to being looked at. Her letters to her son that Jane had read were what old-fashioned mothers wrote-little newsy paragraphs about how "Dad" was doing, and what had been said when they'd had the Stevenses or the Putnams for dinner and bridge. It was like reading a message from the 1940s.

Jane waited for the son to come down. At nine thirty, she was losing patience. There were probably eight or ten bedrooms in this house. In her experience, what fugitives were doing when they went home was resetting the calendar. They were trying unconsciously to go back to a time before their lives had become chaotic and dangerous. It was a time when they had been safe. She supposed that when he was growing up, this big, imposing house must have provided a sense of security for Daniel Martel.

She waited until noon, but there was no sign of him. At twelve thirty, the cook came out and supervised a younger woman wearing the same light blue dress in setting a large round table on the patio with utensils and china for something that looked a bit like afternoon tea. At one fifteen, two couples came outside on the patio. The women both wore broad-brimmed hats and thin summer dresses. One of the men wore a seersucker sport coat; the other wore a loose white shirt with no collar. After a few minutes the host and hostess reappeared.

There was a pleasant, unhurried lunch followed by a period of sitting at the table in the shade under the old trees drinking lemonade and sparkling water freshened by the younger maid every fifteen minutes. At a little after three the sun, which had hung high overhead so the big trees provided shade, sank lower, to an angle that threw bright, harsh rays into the diners' faces. Jane watched the two visiting couples go through the ceremonial steps. The wife would throw a glance at her husband, who had received very little of her attention until then. He would look at his wristwatch in surprise, as though the device had suddenly jumped up from the ground and wrapped itself around his arm. Jane was too far away to hear words, but she could see all the mimed expressions of surprise at how quickly the time had passed, and then a brief recitation of responsibilities that had to be met-Billy's baseball practice, Madison's piano lesson. The women all hugged each other and then hugged each of the men. The men shook hands, with one quick, tight grip and release. Then the host and hostess walked their guests through the house to the front door.

Jane waited while the maid and the cook cleared the table and disappeared into the kitchen. The afternoon had been dreamlike, a turn-of-the-century painting of life among the bourgeoisie. But her attention had never flagged. She'd watched to see whether each phase would be the one that signaled the arrival of Daniel Martel. Would he come to see these visitors Wait for them to leave

She was patient. She had succeeded in preventing him from murdering Jim Shelby, and for now, Shelby was safe. Martel would stay in Indianapolis for a time, probably until he realized how vulnerable it made him to hide in his hometown, or until he began to see the futility of trying to return to a world that had a place for him as a child, but didn't have a place for somebody like the man he had become. It could take months, and it was almost sure to take weeks. She could wait.

In the old days, during the wars of the forests, there were always warriors out in groups of three or two, or even alone, simply staying in the countries of enemies, living unseen in the woods, and observing. Sometimes they would stay there for a few weeks, sometimes for as long as a year.

Jane left the yard during the late afternoon, and returned to her hotel. She showered, ate, and changed into clothes for night, then drove to a Sears store and bought a green-and-brown plaid stadium blanket. When she was back in the car, she put a gun and a knife in her jacket. She returned to the house at dark, parked her car on the street around the corner with its front wheels aimed in the direction of the Martel garage, and walked back into the yard. She stationed herself in a row of ornamental shrubs, wrapped herself in the blanket, and became one of them.

The night was warm, and the windows and sliding doors were all open, with only the screens to cut the sound. She could see into the living room, the kitchen, and the dining room. Upstairs there were lights on, and she could see a couple of ceiling fans spinning to keep the air moving.

The cook and maid came through briefly to finish the last of the kitchen cleaning, and then disappeared into the upper levels, probably for the night. At eleven, Jane stretched out full length with her feet down the incline of the ditch and her blanket wrapped around her. She slept peacefully for a time in the silence of the residential neighborhood. When the noises came, they were not loud. It was just the sound of the mother closing the first-floor windows and sliding doors.

Jane opened her eyes, rested her chin on the blanket, and watched the mother appear at one window, then the next. Then she disappeared for a moment. The back door of the house opened, and then Mr. and Mrs. Martel went down the back steps carefully, and walked, arm in arm, toward their garage. Jane looked at her watch. It was after one thirty.

It was too late for them to be going anywhere for a social engagement. They had to be doing something extraordinary. Jane rolled up her blanket, went low, and trotted quietly along the ditch to the street where her car was parked. She got in behind the wheel, rolled down her windows, and waited. She heard a car door slam, and a moment later she heard a second one slam. The electric whirring of the garage door opener as it raised the door was surprisingly clear in the night air. She heard their car start, counted to thirty, then started her engine and moved ahead to the intersection. She sped up and turned the corner in time to see the Martel car at the end of the block, just disappearing into a right turn.

Jane had spent many hours thinking about the ways of following a car, because she had needed to be sure she wasn't making herself easy to tail. There were plenty of tricks-using two followers in cars and taking turns staying in sight, changing the driver's appearance every few miles, passing on a long, straight stretch and then watching through the mirror instead of the windshield. Police departments sometimes installed two different sets of headlights so they could change the way their cars looked from the front. Others planted electronic transmitters or GPS units and followed without ever coming in sight. Tonight Jane could only drop back as far as possible and stay aware.

It was unlikely that the Martels were very good at spotting a tail, but even in a city the size of Indianapolis, there was much less traffic to hide her Honda as the clock moved toward two a.m. She tried to stay behind a car that was going in the same direction, but it soon turned and disappeared. She knew that the moment of greatest danger for her would be when the Martel car stopped for a red light. That would give the driver-probably the father-nothing to do for a couple of minutes but keep his foot on the brake. He would spend some part of it looking into his rearview mirror at whoever was coming up behind him.

A light ahead of the Martels turned red. Jane continued to the next intersection ahead of her, turned right, went about thirty feet, turned around, nosed out at the corner where she had just turned, and looked up the main road toward the Martels.

The Martel car didn't wait for the red light. The driver paused at the edge of the intersection for a second, saw there was no car coming to his left or right, and accelerated through and kept going.

Jane hesitated. If she came after them, the Martels would see her car and think she was a cop who had witnessed the infraction. The driver wouldn't be able to take his eyes off her. She stayed where she was, waiting and watching their car move farther and farther ahead. She waited until it had moved far enough along the slight curve of the road so a glance in the rearview mirror would not include her pulling back onto the road and following.

There was something she had not anticipated. She had hoped they had simply been told to wait until the middle of the night to visit their son. But they seemed to be doing things that would force a follower to reveal himself. Had Daniel told them to do that Were they so wised-up on their own They didn't look like criminals, and they didn't live like criminals, but neither did their son.

Jane sped up. Her turn and pause had reduced the likelihood that they would recognize her car as the one behind them earlier. She was virtually starting over again as just another car that happened to be out late. Another stoplight was coming up. It was already red. Probably now that Jane was visible again, they would be afraid to run it.

No. The driver tapped the brakes at the intersection, then accelerated through it. Jane kept coming. She was far enough behind them so that she arrived at the intersection just as the signal turned green.

The Martels were speeding. Jane hadn't thought much about it at first, but now that she was closer, she could tell that they weren't just a bit over the limit. They were going at least fifty in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone. She concentrated on keeping her distance steady by timing lights without going too fast. No matter how eager she was to find out where they were going tonight, she couldn't afford to be pulled over by a police officer.

At the next big intersection the Martel car turned to the left. Jane followed it into the left-turn lane, but she was too late to catch the green light. She watched, and saw the car far away, making a right turn into a driveway at the side of a large building.

When the light changed, she followed; then she saw a big red sign that read, "Emergency," and a blue sign that read, "St. Vincent Hospital." She made the turn and followed the driveway up the side of the building in time to see the Martel car stopped under the roof at the emergency room entrance. The wife was out of the driver's seat, and she and an orderly were helping her husband get into a wheelchair.

Jane drifted past and turned to enter a parking lot about fifty yards away. She swung into a parking space and switched off her engine and lights. The orderly wheeled Mr. Martel into the doorway where the doors automatically slid apart to admit them. The wife seemed torn, doing a little dance toward the doors, then looking back at her car sitting there blocking the entrance circle with both doors open and its engine running. She ran to it, slammed the passenger door, continued around the front end, got into the driver's seat, and drove the rest of the way around the circle.

Jane realized that there was only one place for Mrs. Martel to go. Jane rolled over into the back seat of her car, then pulled the blanket over her. Seconds later she heard the car pull into the space beside hers. The engine stopped, the door slammed, and she heard the sound of high heels clicking away toward the emergency room entrance. She waited for a few minutes, then sat up. The lot was empty of people again for the moment.

What this looked like was a heart attack. The wife's erratic driving had nothing to do with being followed. She had not noticed other cars and had not cared. She had just been rushing her husband to the hospital.

Jane stayed where she was and watched for cars coming up the driveway to the emergency room. There was an ambulance. Two big male EMTs pulled a gurney out the back. There was a small, slim girl EMT with long black hair tied tight behind her head perched on the gurney above the patient, doing chest compressions to restore his heartbeat as the gurney clattered through the doors into the emergency room.

A few minutes later, a car pulled up and six teenagers-three boys and three girls-got out. In front, one of the boys was holding his left arm as though it was giving him pain.

It was nearly an hour before a black Porsche wheeled into the lot and parked. Jane listened while the door slammed, then waited for the sound of male footsteps, trying but failing to determine where the man was. Finally she raised her head a bit and looked. It was Daniel Martel. He walked in long, quick strides to the emergency room door and disappeared.

Jane got out of her car and walked to his. She saw that the Nevada license plates had been replaced by Indiana plates. She wrote the license number on a receipt, then the VIN number from the top of the dashboard, on the chance that having it would help her find the address he was using here. She checked to see if he had forgotten to lock the car, then to see if he had left a window open a crack, but it was a halfhearted effort because she knew Martel wasn't the type. She also felt fairly sure that Martel would have bought whatever optional high-end alarm system Porsche offered, so she left the car alone.

She sat for another hour and then made a call with her cell phone.

"Hello" The voice was sleepy, and Jane felt guilty.

"Hi, Sarah. I'm sorry, but I need some information right away. Are you anyplace where Jim can't hear you"

"He's asleep, and I'm in my room with the door closed. He can't hear."

"Can you describe his wife, Susan, to me"

"Well, let's see. She was about my height, five six. She had long blond hair. It was natural honey-blond, and it was thick, as blond hair usually isn't. And shiny, always, like a shampoo commercial. She had the kind of green eyes that sort of change color-bright if she wore bright colors, gray in low light, even a little blue if she wore blue. She was thin, but with a terrific body, with curvy hips and big boobs. She did zero to deserve that body. Her exercise was going to the bar to pick up her drink herself."

"What would be the most distinctive characteristic Any marks, moles, scars"

"Not on her. She was perfect-looking, like a nasty little doll. If there was anything unusual, it was probably her lips. They were cupid's-bow lips, you know They were big, kind of turned up at the corners with a little dip in the center of the upper lip."

"I know the kind you mean, exactly," Jane said.

"Can you tell me what-"

"Not today. I hope another day, soon. Thanks." Jane hung up.

She spent the rest of the night in the lot, thinking about what she had to do. At five thirty, Martel and his mother came out of the main entrance of the hospital and headed for the lot. Jane studied their posture, the way they spoke and walked. They seemed exhausted, but they didn't look like a pair who had just lost a close relative. There were no tears from the mother, no gestures of comfort or condolence from the son.

The son walked the mother to her car, and she got in and drove off. The son got into his car, started it, and pulled out of the lot. But when he reached the street, he turned in the opposite direction from the mother.

Jane followed him at a distance. There were the cars of early commuters and delivery trucks for her to hide behind now, so following a car seemed easier. He drove out of the city to a clean, quiet suburb just off a major highway. As his car approached the entrance to a big hotel, she expected him to turn, but he didn't. When he approached a large, modern apartment complex she prepared to turn in at a different entrance from the one he chose, but he didn't stop. He went on, and pulled the Porsche into the driveway of a house. He stopped in front of the garage, and the garage door opened. He eased the car in.

Jane accelerated so she would be far down the street and around the first corner before he got out and walked to the house. It was best to let everything be a surprise.

21.

When Daniel Martel woke, it was already late afternoon. He remembered immediately what had happened. His father had been lucky. If Mom hadn't thought quickly and gotten him to the hospital, his little warning heart attack probably would have killed him.

Daniel didn't relish the fact that he would have to spend much of his time during the next few days going to visit the old man in the hospital. They hadn't had much to say to each other while he was young, and now he could hardly bear to listen to the old man's voice. The irrelevance of his words to Daniel's life made all conversation an ordeal. The old man's thoughts never reached the world he lived in. He didn't know it existed.

He'd had some hope of sampling the nightlife around here, and trying to meet a few interesting women. He hadn't spent much time in Indianapolis in the past fifteen years or so. There had been just a few one-day or two-day stops on the way to somewhere else, so he didn't know what the stock of women was. When he had been young they'd been plentiful enough. For the past few days he had not gone to any bars or clubs, because he'd been trying to get settled first.

After dinner he would stop by the hospital. Visiting hours ended at nine, so he would go out after that. It occurred to him that he should get the house in order just in case he brought a woman home with him. He remade his bed, fluffed up the pillows, picked the dirty clothes off the floor and put them into the hamper, then went into his closet. He unfolded his tripod and extended the legs, then mounted the video camera on it, aimed the shot, and looked through the viewfinder to be sure. He turned it off. He selected some clothes, tossed them onto the bed, and went into the shower. He dressed, took another look at the bedroom, and stepped into the living room.

The black-haired woman was sitting in his living room in his new wing chair. There was a short cocktail glass in front of her on his coffee table with a little paper napkin under it as though she were protecting the finish of the table, and beside it his previously unopened bottle of tequila taken from the bar across the room. He could see that the clear liquid in the glass had the same crystal clarity, with a slight oily quality, as the liquid in the bottle. Drinking his liquor was a deliberate affront. "Who-what the fuck do you think you're doing here"

"You started with who. Did you stop because you already know"

"What do you want"

"So you do know," she said. "I gave you lots of reasons to leave Jim Shelby alone. Now I'm here to give you a chance to end it."

He was near the sideboard that was against the wall. "What are you talking about" He leaned his right elbow on the top of it.

"You killed Shelby's wife, Susan. I want you to go to the police and tell them you were the one who did it, and that Shelby's innocent."

He laughed. "Are you crazy, or just stupid He's convicted. Cooked. No matter what I say or anybody else says, he's finished. He escaped. That's a crime, too. And why would I even-" He opened the top drawer, snatched the gun he kept there, and aimed it at her.

"Try" she supplied the word.

"You made a mistake coming here."

"Maybe." She picked up the cocktail glass from the coffee table, holding it with the little paper napkin.

"Get up," he said. "This way."

"Which way" she said.

"Through this door. Into the bedroom."

"Not an attractive offer." She shook her head.

"Get in there!" he shouted. "Now!"

"I'm not here to give you another victim."

The mention of it titillated him. Her knowing it was coming made it even better. She would be fearing his power, knowing the uselessness of resisting, long before he did anything. The gun in his hand meant that anything he wanted was his. He said, "Put down that drink." He watched her hand, hoping it would be shaking when she held out the drink to set it down.

She leaned forward and set it on the table, but when she stood, he saw there was already a gun in her other hand. She'd had it hidden behind the arm of the chair. "Yes. I've got one, too."

"If you were going to use it, you would have," he said. "Put it down."

"Here's how it is," she said. "I found your photograph albums. I'm pretty sure there are other things-I'm guessing the still pictures were image grabs taken from video-but it doesn't matter. I'm also pretty sure a few of those women are dead. And I think one of them-the first one in the second album-is Susan Shelby."

"So here we are," Martel said. "What do you think the trade ought to be"

"I'll teach you something about yourself. Then you'll clear Shelby."

Jane had already begun to walk. She sidestepped slowly, steadily, around the back of the big chair. She stepped close to the heavy wooden furniture along the wall, her gun on him, aimed always at the center of his chest.

Martel could not allow her to use his sideboard and the heavy cabinets to shield herself from his fire. He moved away from her along the wall, circling. He detested the weakness of appearing to retreat from her. He had to find a way to reassert his dominance, to expose the fear she must be feeling, and deflate her empty bravado.

He was near the wing chair now. He noticed the glass of tequila she had poured herself on his coffee table beside the bottle. Keeping his eyes on hers, he bent his knees, took up the glass, sniffed it, smelled the tequila, and took a drink. He winced. It tasted much rougher than he'd expected-almost corrosive. He smacked his lips. "A little strong for you"

Jane shrugged. "It's almost pure."

He lifted the bottle and poured a little more over the ice, then took another drink. A few seconds passed, and then his eyes widened, and he gripped his belly. His face assumed a grimace and for the first time he seemed to forget to keep his eyes on Jane. He bent over, facing the floor. Both hands were on his knees. "I get it," he said. "What am I supposed to do How do I stop this"

"You're not supposed to do anything," she said. "You don't stop it."

His head jerked upward, and then he raised his gun. He pulled the trigger, but there was only a click. He held on to the empty gun. "Give me the antidote!" He seemed to become more determined. When he bent over in pain, he dropped the gun, jammed his trigger finger down his throat, and began to retch, but nothing came out.

Jane stood where she was. "Throw up, cut your head off-whatever you like. What I came to teach you wasn't that you were scared. It was that you were stupid."

He kept trying a few more times, but he couldn't get his vomit reflex to work now because the neurotoxin was taking over. He lost his balance and fell to the floor. He rocked back and forth, holding his belly for a few minutes, and went into convulsions. Then he lay still.

Jane put on her surgical gloves as she watched. She picked up his gun from the floor, using only the pen from her purse in the barrel, and set it on the coffee table beside the glass of hemlock distillate and tequila. She set the full magazine she had removed from the pistol beside it, then carefully pressed the magazine release with the pen so she could remove the empty one she had inserted.

She walked into his office and brought out his laptop computer. She plugged it in and read over the confession and suicide note she had written on the laptop. It was filled with the remorse and self-loathing he never had felt. The crime that the note claimed he regretted most was the murder of Susan Shelby and the framing of her husband for it. But there had been many other crimes. Jane saved the note, then knelt beside the body and pressed the fingers on the proper keys-the right hand on J, K, L, and all the right-side keys, and the left on A, S, D, F and all the left-side keys. Then she brought back the final note and left it on the screen. There was no printer in the house, so she was relieved of the chore of forging his signature.

The fact that his prints were on the gun, the glass of poison, the bottle, and the computer keyboard would be sufficient. She went back into the kitchen and left the bottle of Cicuta maculata poison she had brought, so there would be no question of why cicutoxin was found only in the drink and the tequila. She went to the den again and brought out the two photograph albums. She opened the second one to the pictures of what must have been the last hour of Susan Shelby's life, and propped the other album to keep it open.

Jane went through the house making sure everything else was the way she had found it, and there was nothing left that she had touched bare-handed. She went into the bedroom and found the video camera. She saw it was turned off, but turned it on, pressed the rewind button, then pressed "play," and watched the viewfinder just to be sure nothing had been taped. She rewound it and turned it off. It struck her that if Martel had gotten his way, he would have been taping himself killing her just about now. She went back through the living room to the entry.

It was dark out when she opened the door. She set the lock button and closed the door before she took off her surgical gloves. She used one to hold Martel's spare key to lock the bolt from outside. As she walked away, she felt as though she had just lit a very long fuse.

The gray Honda moved onto the interstate and out of the vicinity of Indianapolis, and then out of Indiana entirely. It was as though over a period of less than two days, a small shadow had passed over the town, and if people had seen it they had not separated it in their minds from all of the other variations in light and dark that had come and gone.

As Jane drove, thoughts of death had already receded and become distant to her-once again, just one of the things that she knew. What she was thinking was that right now it was time for Jane McKinnon to go home while there was still enough left of her marriage to coax back to life. She was almost certain that, even with the new scars to remind him of her imperfection, she would be able to make Carey glad she was back.