Dance for the Dead

DANCE FOR THE DEAD

Thomas Perry

Copyright (c) 1996 by Thomas Perry

For Jo

with love to Alix and Isabel

The common aim of all war parties was to bring back persons to replace the mourned-for dead. This could be done in three ways: by bringing back the scalp of a dead enemy (this scalp might even be put through an adoption ceremony); by bringing back a live prisoner (to be adopted, tortured, and killed); or by bringing back a live prisoner to be allowed to live and even to replace in a social role the one whose death had called for this "revenge."

Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 1969

1

The tall, slim woman hastily tied her long, dark hair into a knot behind her head, planted her feet in the center of the long courthouse corridor, and waited. A few litigants and their attorneys passed her, some of them secretly studying her, more because she was attractive than because she was standing motionless, forcing them to step around her on their way to the courtrooms. Her chest rose and fell in deep breaths as though she had been running, and her eyes looked past them, having already dismissed them before they approached as she stared into the middle distance.

She heard the chime sound above the elevator thirty feet away. Before the doors had fully parted, three large men in sportcoats slipped out between them and spun their heads to stare up the hallway. All three seemed to see her within an instant, their eyes widening, then narrowing to focus, and then becoming watchful and predatory, losing any hint of introspection as they began to move toward her, one beside each wall and one in the middle, increasing their pace with each step.

Several bystanders averted their eyes and sidestepped to avoid them, but the woman never moved. She hiked up the skirt of her navy blue business suit so it was out of her way, took two more deep breaths, then swung her shoulder bag hard at the first man's face.

The man's eyes shone with triumph and eagerness as he snatched the purse out of the air. The triumph turned to shock as the woman slipped the strap around his forearm and used the momentum of his charge to haul him into the second man, sending them both against the wall to her right. As they caromed off it, she delivered a kick to one and a chop to the other to put them on the floor. This bought her a few heartbeats to devote to the third man, who was moving along the left wall to get behind her.

She leaned back and swung one leg high. The man read her intention, stopped, and held up his hands to clutch her ankle, but her back foot left the ground and she hurled her weight into him. As her foot caught him at thigh level and propelled him into the wall, there was the sickening crack of his knee popping. He crumpled to the floor and began to gasp and clutch at his crippled leg as the woman rolled to the side and sprang up.

The first two men were rising to their feet. Her fist jabbed out at the nearest one and she rocked him back, pivoted to throw an elbow into the bridge of his nose, and brought a knee into the second man's face.

There was a loud slapping sound and the woman's head jerked nearly to her left shoulder as a big fist swung into her cheekbone. Strong arms snaked around her from behind, lifted her off her feet to stretch her erect, and she saw the rest as motion and flashes. The first two men rushed at her in rage, aiming hard roundhouse punches at her head and face, gleeful in the certainty that she saw the blows coming but could do nothing to block them or even turn to divert their force.

Two loud, deep voices overlapped, barking for dominance. "Police officers! Freeze!"

"Step away from her!" When her opponents released her and stepped away, she dropped to her knees and covered her face with her hands. In a moment, several bystanders who had stood paralyzed with alarm seemed to awaken. They were drawn closer by some impulse to be of use, but they only hovered helplessly nearby without touching her or speaking.

The judge's chambers were in shadow except for a few horizontal slices of late-afternoon sunlight that shone through the blinds on the wood-paneled wall. Judge Kramer sat in his old oak swivel chair with his robe unzipped but with the yoke still resting on his shoulders. He loosened his tie and leaned back, making the chair's springs creak, then pressed the play button on the tape recorder.

There were sounds of chairs scraping, papers shuffling, and a garble of murmured conversation, so that the judge's empty chamber seemed to be crowded with invisible people. A female voice came from somewhere too close to the microphone. "This deposition is to be taken before Julia R. Kinnock, court stenographer at 501 North Spring Street, Los Angeles, California, at ten... seventeen a.m. on November third. The court's instructions were that if there is an objection to the use of a tape recorder, it will be turned off." There was silence. "Will the others in the room please identify themselves."

"David M. Schoenfeld, court-appointed counsel to Timothy Phillips." Schoenfeld's voice was smooth, and each syllable took too long to come out. Judge Kramer could almost see him leaning into the microphone to croon.

"Nina Coffey, Department of Children's Services, Los Angeles County, in the capacity of guardian for a minor person." Kramer had read her name on a number of official papers, but he had never heard her voice before. It was clear and unapologetic, the words quick and clipped, as though she were trying to guard against some kind of vulnerability.

"Kyle Ambrose, Assistant District Attorney, Los Angeles." As usual, the prosecutor sounded vaguely confused, a pose that had irritated Kramer through six or seven long trials.

Then came the low, monotone voices that were at once self-effacing and weighty, voices of men who had spent a lot of time talking over radios. They started quietly and grew louder, because the last part of each name was the important part.

"Lieutenant James E. Bates, Los Angeles Police Department."

"Agent Joseph Gould, Federal Bureau of Investigation."

There was some more shuffling of papers and then Julia Kinnock said, "Mr. Ambrose, do you wish to begin?"

Ambrose's parched, uncertain voice came in a beat late. "Will you state your name for the record, please?"

There was some throat clearing, and then the high, reedy voice of a young boy. "Tim... Timothy John Phillips."

Schoenfeld's courtroom voice intoned, "Perhaps it would be a good idea to ask that the record show that Lieutenant Bates and Agent Gould here present have verified that the deponent's fingerprints match those of Timothy John Phillips, taken prior to his disappearance."

The two voices muttered, "So verified," in the tone of a response in a church. Amen, thought Kramer. Schoenfeld had managed to sidestep onto the record with the one essential fact to be established in the case from Schoenfeld's point of view.

Ambrose's voice became slow and clear as he spoke to the boy. "You are to answer of your own accord. You are not to feel that you are in any way obligated to tell us things you don't want to." Judge Kramer could imagine Ambrose's dark eyes flicking to the faces of Schoenfeld, the lawyer, and Nina Coffey, the social worker. It was a confidence game, as Ambrose's legal work always was. The kid would have to answer all of the questions at some point, but Ambrose was trying to put the watchdogs to sleep. "Mr. Schoenfeld is here as your lawyer, so if you have any doubts, just ask him. And Mrs. Coffey will take you home if you're too tired. Do you understand?"

The small, high-pitched voice said, "Yes."

"How old are you?"

"Eight."

"Can you tell me, please, your earliest recollections?" Judge Kramer clenched his teeth.

"You mean, ever?"

"Yes."

"I remember... I guess I remember a lot of things. Christmas. Birthdays. I remember moving into our house in Washington."

"When was that?"

"I don't know."

A male voice interjected, "The lease on the Georgetown house began four years ago on January first. That was established during the murder investigation. He would have been four." The voice would be that of the F.B.I, agent, thought the judge.

"Do you remember anything before that, in another house?"

"No, I don't think so."

"When you moved in, was Miss Mona Turley already with you?"

"I don't know. I guess so."

"Who lived there?"

"My parents, me, Mona."

"Did you have relatives besides your parents? Cousins or uncles?"

"No, just my grandma."

"Did you ever see her?"

"Not that I remember. She lived far away. We used to send her a Christmas card every year."

"Did you?" There was the confusion again, as though Ambrose were hearing it for the first time and trying to fathom the implications.

"Yeah. I remember, because my daddy would put my handprint on it. He would write something, and then he would squish my hand onto a stamp pad and press it on the card, because I couldn't write yet."

Ambrose hesitated, then said gently, "Do you remember anybody else? Any other grown-ups that you were with?"

"You mean Mr. and Mrs. Phillips?"

"Yes."

"I know about them. I don't think I ever saw them."

"So when you say your 'parents' you mean Raymond and Emily Decker?"

"They were my mother and father."

Judge Kramer's brows knitted in distaste. This was typical of Ambrose. Get on with it, he thought. An eight-year-old's distant recollections weren't going to get Ambrose anything in a criminal investigation. Such meticulous, redundant questioning had bought him an inflated reputation as a prosecutor - laying the groundwork for an unshakable, brick-hard case. It looked like magic to juries, but to Judge Kramer and the opposing attorneys who knew where he was going, it was like watching an ant carrying single crumbs until he had a hero sandwich.

"So you lived in Washington from the time you were four until...? We'll get back to that. Tell me what it was like in Washington. Did you like it?"

"It was okay."

"Were your parents... nice to you?"

There was a hint of shock in the boy's voice. "Sure."

"How about discipline? Rules. Were there rules?"

"Yeah."

"Can you tell me some?"

"Ummm... Pick up the toys. Brush your teeth. My father always brushed his teeth when I did, and then he'd show me his fillings and tell me I'd need some if I didn't brush the ones in the back."

"What happened when you didn't follow the rules?" Ambrose was casual. "Did they hit you?"

Now the little voice was scandalized. "No."

"Did you go to school?"

"Sure. The Morningside School. It wasn't far, so sometimes we walked."

"So life was pretty good in Washington?"

"Yeah."

"What did you do when you weren't in school?"

"I don't know. Mona used to take me to the park when I was little, and then later sometimes I'd go with my friends. She would sit in the car and wait for me."

Ambrose paused and seemed to be thinking for a long time, but then Judge Kramer recognized the sound of someone whispering. After a second exchange it sounded angry. He knew it was Nina Coffey. The lawyer Schoenfeld said, "I must point out that this is not an adversarial proceeding, and this part of the story adds no new information to any of the investigations in progress. Miss Coffey has consented to this questioning because she was assured its purpose was for the safety and future welfare of the child. She has a right to withdraw the consent of the Department of Children's Services if she feels this is unnecessarily traumatic. The child has been over this ground several times with the psychologist and the juvenile officers already. Perhaps we could depart from our regular habits of thoroughness and skip to the recent past."

Ambrose sounded defensive. "Then would one of you care to help us in that regard to make the record comprehensible?"

Nina Coffey said, "Timmy, tell me if anything I say isn't true."

"Okay."

"Timmy was raised from the time of his earliest recollections until the age of six by Raymond and Emily Decker. They hired Miss Mona Turley as a nanny when they came to Washington, D.C. He has no direct knowledge of earlier events. He was told he was Timmy Decker. From every assessment, he had a normal early childhood. It was a loving home. Miss Turley was a British citizen and a trained nanny, a legal resident alien. There are no signs of physical or psychological abuse, or of developmental difficulties that would indicate deprivation of any kind." She said pointedly, "This is all covered in the caseworker's report, so it already is part of the record."

Judge Kramer felt like applauding. His finger had been hovering over the fast fwd button, but he knew that he wouldn't have let it strike. Either you listened to all of it or you were just another politician in a costume.

Ambrose went on. "All right. Now, Timmy, we have to talk about some unpleasant things, and I'll try to keep it short. What happened on the afternoon of July twenty-third two years ago?"

"I don't know."

Schoenfeld prompted. "That was the day when they died."

"Oh," said Timmy. "Mona and I went to the shoe store after school. Usually we came home at three, but that day we didn't. After we bought the shoes we walked in and everything had changed. I remember Mona opened the door, and then she stopped and went, 'Uh!' Like that. Then she made me wait outside while she went in alone. She was inside a long time. I thought it was a surprise, and she was telling my parents I was there so they could hide. So I went around to the side of the house and looked in the window. And I saw them." His voice cracked, and the judge could hear that he was trying to keep the sob from coming out of his throat in front of all these strange adults, so it just stayed there, with the muscles clamping it in place. Judge Kramer had heard a lot of testimony that had to be forced out through that kind of throat, so he had become expert.

"They were covered with blood. I never knew so much blood came out of a person. It was everywhere. The walls, the floor. I could see Mona was in the next room on the telephone. Then she hung up and walked into my bedroom. I ran around to that window, and it was broken. All my stuff was gone."

"What do you mean 'stuff'?"

"My toys, my clothes, my books, everything. They stole my stuff. She kept looking around my room and frowning."

"What then?"

"She looked up and saw me. She ran out of the house and grabbed me. She took me to the car and we drove away."

"What did she say about it?"

"She started to say that my parents were called away, but I told her I saw them."

"What did she say then?"

"She said that awful things sometimes happen, and a bunch of stuff about how they wanted me to be safe more than anything. I didn't hear a lot of it because I was crying and wasn't really listening."

"Where did she take you?"

"She had a friend. A man. He used to come to the house to pick her up sometimes. She said he was a lawyer. She took me to his house."

"For the record, do you know his name?"

"Dennis."

"Was his last name Morgan?"

"Yes."

"Do you know the name of the street?"

"No. It wasn't anyplace I ever was before. We drove a long time on a big road, and then at the end there were a lot of turns. By then it was night."

"What happened there?"

"She put me to sleep on the couch, but I could hear them talking in the kitchen."

"What did they say?"

"She told him about my parents. She said it looked like an abuttar."

Abattoir, the judge translated. No wonder Nina Coffey was all over Ambrose. This kid had looked in his own window and seen his parents - or the ones he knew as parents - lying on the floor butchered, and Ambrose was asking him about spankings and dental hygiene. The man was a dangerous idiot.

"What did he say?"

"He said she did the right thing to call the police, and the wrong thing to leave. Then she said a lot of things. She said it looked as though whoever came in wasn't even looking for them. They were looking for me."

"What made her say that?"

"They broke into my room at a time when I was usually home and my parents weren't. She said it looked like they tried to make my parents tell them something. And then the only things they took were my stuff, and all the pictures."

"What pictures were those?"

"My father used to take a lot of pictures. Like when we were at the beach..." Here it comes, thought the judge. The sob forced its way out, and there was a squealing sound, and then the tears came in volume.

"Come on, Timmy," said Nina Coffey. "Let's go take a break."

Amid the sounds of chairs scraping and feet hitting the floor, Ambrose said redundantly, "Let the record show that we recessed at this point."

There was another click, and the recording began again. "We will continue now. It is six minutes after eleven," said the stenographer.

Ambrose said, "Timmy, I'm sorry to ask so many sad questions."

"It's okay," said the little voice. There was no conviction behind it.

"You were at the lawyer's house. They didn't agree, right?"

"He told her to go to the police. Mona said they would just make me stay in a place where I wouldn't be safe. They talked for a long time, and I fell asleep."

"What happened when you woke up?"

"The lawyer - Dennis - he was talking on the telephone. I couldn't hear what he was saying. When he hung up, he and Mona talked some more. He gave her some money. He had a lot of money inside of books on the bookshelf, and some in his pocket. He gave her that too."

"Then what?"

"The phone rang and Dennis answered it, and talked to somebody else. Then we all got in the car and Dennis drove. This time we drove all night and all the next day, almost. Then we got to Jane's house."

"What is Jane's full name?"

"I don't know."

"Where does she live?"

"I don't know."

"Tell me about her."

"We went to her house. She put us in a room upstairs, and we went to sleep. When I woke up, she made us breakfast. Mona was already awake."

"I mean about Jane. What was she like?"

"I was afraid of her at first."

"Why?"

"She was tall and skinny and had long black hair, and she seemed to listen to people with her eyes."

Ambrose paused. "I see. What did she do?"

"She and Mona talked for a long time. Then I heard her say she would make us disappear."

"Is that why you thought she was scary?"

"No... maybe."

"How long did you stay with Jane?"

"A long time. I think Mona said it was three weeks, but it seemed like a year. Then we all got in Jane's car and she drove us to Chicago."

"What did she do then?"

"She stayed for a day or two, and then one morning I woke up and she was gone."

"Was Mona surprised?"

"No. Mona acted like it was normal, and didn't talk about her again. Mona and I lived in Chicago after that. Mona was Diana Johnson, and I was her son. She wanted me to be Andrew, but I didn't like it, so I got to stay Tim."

"How did you live?"

"Like people do."

"I mean, did Mona have a job - did she go to work?"

"Yes. While I was in school."

"They called you Tim Johnson at school?"

"Yes."

"When did you start - what grade?"

"Kindergarten. I had already been in kindergarten, so it was the second time."

"And you're in the second grade now?"

"Yes."

"Were you afraid in Chicago?"

"At first I was. It was different. I was afraid the bad people would get Mona, and then I would be all alone. But after a while I made some friends, and got used to it, and I didn't think about that part much anymore. I was sad sometimes."

"And Mona pretended to be your mother for over two years?"

"I guess so."

"What else did she do? Did she still see anybody you knew from Washington?"

"No. She used to talk on the phone a lot."

"To whom? Jane?"

"No. Dennis."

"Did you ever hear what she said?"

"Once in a while, but it wasn't really okay. She would go in her bedroom and talk to him. Sometimes she would tell me what she said."

"Then a little over a week ago something changed, didn't it?"

"Yes. Everything."

"You found out who you were, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Excuse me, Mr. Ambrose." It was Schoenfeld's resonant voice again. "Maybe we should let Timmy tell us exactly what happened in his own words from here on. I believe you've done an admirable job in laying the groundwork, but now we're in new territory, and I have no objection to letting Mr. Phillips speak freely and tell us whatever he can that will aid in the possible prosecutions." Of course not, thought the judge. Schoenfeld could be magnanimous. He had already established that Timmy was Mr. Phillips, and nothing else that anyone said or did from there on was of any consequence for Schoenfeld.

"Thank you," said Ambrose. "Timmy, tell us what happened."

"I came home from school, and Mona was there, and so was Dennis the lawyer, and so was Jane. Dennis said he had spent two years trying to figure out why anyone would want to hurt my parents and me, and now he knew."

"This was in Chicago?"

"Yeah," said Timmy. "He told me that when my mother died they had special doctors look at her, and that she had never been to the hospital to have a baby. He said he got to look at a copy of the birth certificate they had at my school, and it wasn't real. He said I wasn't adopted. They just drew a picture of a birth certificate and said it was mine. He said that the reason they did that was because they loved me very much and had always wanted a little boy."

Judge Kramer stopped the tape and backed it up to listen to the last exchange again. It was a hell of a way to explain a kidnapping. In spite of everything, he had to admire Dennis Morgan. After what he had seen, this little boy was going to be an annuity for the psychiatrists for the next fifty years. There was no reason to make it worse.

The tape kept running. "Then he told you about your other parents?"

"Yes. Mr. and Mrs. Phillips. They died when I was one."

"And your grandma?"

"I knew about her already, but I didn't know she had died like all my parents. She had been dead for three years."

"Did Mr. Morgan tell you that she had left you some money?"

"Yeah. He said that when Mr. and Mrs. Phillips died she put all the family money in a big pot and said it could only go to me. And when I was gone she hired a company to take care of the money and keep looking for me forever."

"Did she say what they were called?"

"Trusty."

Judge Kramer prayed that Ambrose wasn't about to drag an eight-year-old on a field trip through a morass of legal terminology. What could the child possibly know about trustees and executors?

"What happened last week to change that? Did he tell you?"

"He said that the Trusty had gotten tired of looking and waiting, and they were going to say I wasn't alive anymore. So he called Jane again."

"I'm very curious about this Jane. I understand about Mona. She was your nanny, and she loved you. The lawyer, Mr. Morgan, was a very close friend of Mona's, right?"

"Yeah. They were going to get married when the people came and got my parents. Then they couldn't because we'd get caught. That was why he looked so hard to find out where I was really supposed to be - so Mona could go back to being Mona and marry him."

"But why was Jane doing it? Did she know your parents?"

"No. Mona had to tell her about them that time when we went to her house. Mona thought they worked for the government, so the people who hurt them must be spies. It took Jane a long time to find out that my parents didn't work for the government."

"Then Jane was Mona's friend?"

"I don't think so. Dennis was the one who called her."

Judge Kramer could imagine the F.B.I, agent. He was going to make his career sorting all this out. Not the least interesting question was why a prominent Washington defense attorney had the telephone number of a woman who made people disappear. They would be going over the record of Morgan's former clients right now to see if there were any on their Most Wanted List.

Even Ambrose seemed to sense that he had crossed the trail of an unfamiliar creature. "The lawyer knew her?" he repeated. "Did he pay her?"

"No. Dennis said he tried, but she had decided that so many people loved me that I must be a fine boy."

"Hmmmm..."

Judge Kramer had a vision of Ambrose's raised eyebrows, as he had seen them during cross-examinations.

"Did anybody say anything else about her?"

"Dennis. He said that from then on we had to do everything that Jane said, exactly. It didn't matter what anybody else said, we should listen to her."

"So she was the boss."

"He said that he had done everything he could to find out things, but the only way to solve this was to walk into court and surprise everybody and say who I was. He said the bad people knew I must be alive, so they would be expecting me to come. Jane was the one who knew how to get us past them."

"So you all took an airplane to California?"

"No. Jane said we had to drive all the way or the bad people might see us. Every day we got a new car. She would go to a place where they rented them, and then drive all day and then leave it and rent another one. Then we were in California."

"What then? Did you stay in a hotel?"

"No. Jane said that if people were after me, they would be watching hotels near the courthouse, because they would be expecting us to do that. So we went to the courthouse right away."

"What time was it?"

"About dinnertime. Jane opened the lock on an office and we stayed there all night. I fell asleep on a couch."

"What happened when you woke up?"

"I heard Dennis come into the office. He had been out in the building by himself. He said they had pulled a trick on us, and now we had to go to a different building. So we ran out and got into our car and drove again. Jane said on the way that it didn't feel right."

"Did she say anything else?"

"She asked Dennis if there was any way of doing this besides actually showing up in court. Could we call and ask for a delay or something. He said that he didn't know who was honest and who wasn't. A phone call wouldn't stop the case for sure, but it would tell the bad guys I was coming for sure. Then he said if they fooled the judge they could do something that day, right away. I don't know what. Jane drove for a long time without saying anything. Then she said, 'is there any way to know what's in the building?'"

"What did she mean by that?"

"She said, 'We want to fade in. If Timmy's the only boy in the crowd, we're in trouble.' She said something about adoption and custody."

"I see," said Ambrose. "Did Mr. Morgan know the answer?"

"We stopped at a phone booth and he looked in the book and made a call. He came back and got into the car and made Jane scoot over, so he could drive. He said he and Mona would be getting a divorce before they got married, and Jane would carry his briefcase like she was their lawyer. But we would go to Courtroom 22 on the fifth floor instead."

"Did Jane agree?"

"At first. But then we got near the courthouse, and Jane said two men in a car were following us. They kept coming faster and faster, and then they tried to get in front of us, and they bumped the car."

"What did Mr. Morgan do?"

"He got all nervous, and kept trying to go fast and keep the car straight. Jane said to him, 'Well? What's it going to be?' and he said, 'I can't get them into the building. It's got to be me.' He was scared. He looked pale and sick and sweaty."

"And Jane?"

"She was quiet. He drove to the parking lot and stopped. Mona kissed him, and Jane yanked me out the door and we started running."

"Did you see what Mr. Morgan did after you were out of the car?"

"I heard this loud bang, and I turned around and it looked like what he had done was go backwards into the other car. One of the men jumped out and started hitting him. He tried to fight but he wasn't good at it. And the other man got out of the car and ran after us, so Dennis tried to tackle him, but the man kicked him, and the first one grabbed him around the neck. I didn't see any more because Jane and Mona and I were running and I tripped, but Jane held my hand and kept me from falling. We ran up the steps."

"Did anyone try to stop you?"

"There was a man on the other side of the glass door, and he saw us and put his foot against it so it wouldn't open. Jane didn't stop. She let go of me and hit it with her shoulder and stuck her purse in it when it opened a little. The man put his arm there to push the purse out, but as soon as his arm was in there she jerked the purse out by the strap and shut the door on his arm. When he pulled the handle to get his arm out, she pushed the door into his face and we ran on."

"Anybody else?"

"There were men right by the elevator, and they started coming toward us. We ran up the stairs. I counted four flights, but there was a door and it only had a two on it. We ran through it, and when we passed the elevator Jane pushed the button and ran to another staircase, and we got up to the third floor. We got to the fourth floor, and we heard a door below us slam open against the wall, and some men were running up after us. Mona was breathing hard and then she was crying too. She touched my arm at the top of the next landing and said, 'This is my stop. Keep going. I love you, Timmy.'"

"What did Jane say?"

"Nothing. She just looked at her, and then we ran up to the fifth floor. Just when we got to the top, I looked back and saw Mona on the stairs. She was holding on to both railings and kicking at these men. I saw one of them reaching out like he was trying to hug her. But right then, the door that said five swung open right in front of us. It was one of the men that was by the elevator. He looked surprised, and Jane just punched him and kept going."

"She hit him in the jaw?" The judge could sense Ambrose's raised eyebrow again.

"No. In the neck. Then we were on the fifth floor, and we ran down this long hallway. When we got to the corner I could see 'twenty to thirty' painted on the wall with an arrow pointing to the left, but the door we had used to get there opened up again and three big men were running after us. Jane jerked me around the corner and said, 'Run to the room that says twenty-two. Don't stop for anybody until you're right in the front where the judge sits, and yell, "I'm Timothy Phillips."' I tried to say something, but she said, 'Don't talk, just run.'"

Judge Kramer pushed the stop button and sat in his dark office. He had been on the bench when the little boy had burst through the doors and run up the aisle screaming. The bailiff had made a reasonably competent attempt to head him off, but he had actually touched the bench and yelled, "I'm Tim Phillips." What had happened in the hallway Judge Kramer had heard from one of the policemen who had piled out of the adjoining courtrooms to quell the disturbance.

Judge Kramer pressed the intercom button on his telephone.

"Yes, Judge?" came his assistant's voice.

"Where are they holding this 'Jane' woman?"

"I think they took her for medical treatment to County-USC. I'll find out if she's in the jail ward and let you know."

"No," Kramer said. "Just call the precinct and tell them I want to see her."

"Would you like a conference room at the jail?"

"Have them bring her here."

The male police officer was tall and rangy, and the female was short and blond with her hair drawn up in the back and cinched in that way they all knew how to do. The department never had all-male teams transport a female prisoner anymore, so the judge should have been used to it, but the pairs still seemed to him like married couples from a planet where people wore uniforms. They ushered the prisoner into his chambers. When her face came into the light he felt his breath suck in. He had never gotten used to seeing a young woman's face with bruises and cuts and blackened eyes. He tried to see past them.

She was not quite what he had heard described on the tape. She was tall, as tall as he was if he stood up, and this realization made him intuit that it was better not to, so he stayed down behind his big desk. Her hair was black and hung loose to a place below her shoulder blades, but that probably wasn't the way she wore it; they had combed it out because they always searched women's hair. He could see that Timmy's description was not wrong, just uninformed. This woman had the strange, angular beauty he associated with fashion models: it was striking, but geometric and cold. The judge's taste ran more to women like his late wife and the little policewoman, who looked round and soft and warm. The woman's hands were cuffed in front of her instead of behind, which meant they weren't taking all the precautions, but the police officers were wary: the policewoman kept a hand at her left elbow, and the man was a step behind and to her right, leaving just enough room to swing his club.

Judge Kramer said, "Thank you very much, officers. We've got some coffee in the outer office, and I keep soft drinks in the little refrigerator under the water cooler. I'll be finished with the prisoner in about fifteen minutes."

The policewoman said, "Your Honor, we should mention - "

He interrupted, "I know. I spoke with the arresting officer. Has she hurt anyone since she's been in custody?"

"No."

"Then I'll chance it."

The prisoner held out her hands, and the male officer unlocked the cuffs, took them off, and said to no one in particular, "We'll be right outside."

When they had closed the door, Judge Kramer said to her, "Sit down, please."

The woman sat in the chair in front of the desk.

Judge Kramer probed for a way to break the silence. "I hear you're one of those people who could kill me with a pencil."

She said simply, "If I am, then I wouldn't need a pencil." She looked at the tape recorder on his desk. "Is that running?"

He said, "I want to assure you that no record will be made of this conversation. I just listened to a deposition of Timothy Phillips, and I decided that the only person left who can answer the questions I have is you. Mona Turley and Dennis Morgan are dead."

She nodded silently and watched him.

"What do you know about the child's situation?"

"Who are you? Why are you the one who has questions?"

His eyes widened involuntarily, as though someone had thrown a glass of water in his face. "I'm sorry," he said. "When you've been a judge for a few years, you're used to being the only one in the room everyone takes at face value. My name is John Kramer. I'm the judge who was presiding in Courtroom 22. We hadn't gotten to the petition to declare Timothy Phillips legally dead when he ran in and disrupted my court. For the moment, the matter is still undecided, and I've left it that way."

"Why?"

"First I had to recess while the officers took you away. Then I had to adjourn for a few days to give time to the authorities who can verify Timothy's claim. In a day or so, oddly enough, I have to set a date to give the petitioners the opportunity to refute the claim - fingerprints, blood tests, and all. Then I have to rule on it."

"Will you be the one who decides what happens to him after that?"

He shook his head. "Not directly. At the moment he's in the care of a very protective woman from Children's Services named Nina Coffey. After a time there will be criminal cases - probably several of them. There will be a family court case to decide who is granted guardianship of Timmy. There will be some sort of civil action to settle the disposition of the trust. I can influence the direction some of those cases take if I find out the truth and get it on the record so it can't be ignored. I'm asking what you know because I don't have much time and I need to know where to begin. Once I rule on the petition that's before me, it's out of my hands."

"Is any of this legal?"

"What I'm doing is so contrary to legal procedure that it has no name."

She sat erect in the chair and met his gaze steadily while she decided. "He was a ward of his grandmother because his parents were killed in a car crash. She was old at the time - about eighty. Whoever she hired to watch him didn't. Along came Raymond and Emily Decker, and he disappeared. I have no way of knowing what was going on in their minds at the time. They may have been kidnappers who stalked him from birth, or they may have been one of those half-crazy couples who create their own little world that doesn't need to incorporate all of the facts in front of their eyes. If you read the old newspaper reports, it sounds as though maybe they just found him wandering around alone in a remote area of a county park, picked him up, and then convinced themselves that he was better off with them than with anybody who let a two-year-old get that lost. I've tried to find out, and so did Mona and Dennis, but what we learned was full of contradictions."

"What sorts of contradictions?"

"Timmy says they sent pictures of him to his grandmother, sometimes holding a newspaper, sometimes with his fingerprints. He doesn't know what the letters said. If the Deckers knew where to send the letters, then they knew who he was. But I can't tell whether it was a straight ransom demand or they were trying to keep him officially alive so he could claim his inheritance when he grew up, or whether they were just being kind to an old lady by letting her know her grandson was okay."

"What do you know about the grandmother?"

"From what Dennis Morgan said, the police stopped looking. That means they never saw the letters. Grandma kept looking, so maybe she got them. She must have believed he would turn up eventually, because she tied up all the family money in a living trust for him and made a business-management firm named Hoffen-Bayne the trustee. She died a few years ago."

"Before or after Raymond and Emily Decker?"

"Before. But I'm not the best source for dates and addresses. I'm sure if you don't have it in the papers on your desk yet, it'll be in the next batch. Anyway, I don't think she hired somebody to kill them for kidnapping her grandson."

"You're the only source of information I have right now. Who did kill them?"

"I don't know."

"Who do you think did it?"

"When someone killed the Deckers, they also stole all of Timmy's belongings, every picture of him, and a lot of paper. If you're looking for somebody, you would want the photographs. But they took his toys, clothes, everything. That's a lot of work. The only reason I can think of for doing that is to hide the fact that he was alive - that a little boy lived there. Maybe they did such a good job of wiping off their own prints that they got all of his too, as a matter of course. I doubt it."

"Who would want to accomplish that?"

She hesitated, and he could tell she was preparing to be disbelieved. "What I'm telling you is not from personal knowledge. It's what Dennis Morgan told me. This company, Hoffen-Bayne, got to administer a fortune of something like a hundred million dollars. They would get a commission of at least two percent a year, or two million, for that. They also got to invest the money any way they pleased, and that gave them power. There are some fair-sized companies you can control for that kind of investment. As long as Timmy was lost, the trust would continue. You're a judge. You tell me what would happen if Timmy turned up in California."

"The court would - will - appoint a guardian, and probably in this case, a conservator, if you're right about the size of the inheritance."

"That wouldn't be Hoffen-Bayne?"

"We don't appoint business-management companies to raise children, or to audit themselves."

"Then the power and money would be in jeopardy."

"Certainly they would have to at least share the control."

"And they did try to have him declared dead."

"That's a legal convenience. It relieves them of responsibility to search for him, and also protects them if someone were to ask later why they're administering a trust for a client who hasn't been seen for seven years."

"Then it would have been even more convenient if he were really dead. They wouldn't have had to go to court at all."

"Filing a motion is a little different from hiring assassins to hunt down a six-year-old and kill him."

"Maybe. I think filing the motion was a trap. I think Dennis Morgan was poking around, and somebody noticed it. It's not all that hard to find out what you want about people: the trick is to keep them from knowing you're doing it. Dennis was a respected lawyer, but investigating wasn't his field; lawyers hire people to do that. I think they sensed that if a Washington attorney was interested, then Timmy was going to turn up sometime soon."

"And you - all of you - got caught in the trap?"

"Yes." She stood up. "You asked me what I think, so you would know where to begin. I've told you. Dennis couldn't find anybody but Hoffen-Bayne who would benefit from Timmy's death - no competing claims to the money or angry relatives, for instance. Nobody tried to break the will during all the years while Timmy was missing. But I don't know what Dennis got right and what he got wrong, and I can't prove any of it. I only saw the police putting handcuffs on four of the men in the courthouse, and there won't be anything on paper that connects them with Hoffen-Bayne or anybody else. I know I never saw them before, so I can't have been the one they recognized. They saw Timmy." She took a step toward the door. "Keep him safe."

The judge said, "Then there's you." He watched her stop and face him. "Who are you?"

"Jane Whitefield."

"I mean what's your interest in this?"

"Dennis Morgan asked me to keep Timmy alive. I did that. We all did that."

"What are you? A private detective, a bodyguard?"

"I'm a guide."

"What kind of guide?"

"I show people how to go from places where someone is trying to kill them to other places where nobody is."

"What sort of pay do you get for this?"

"Sometimes they give me presents. I declare the presents on my income taxes. There's a line for that."

"Did somebody give you a present for this job?"

"If you fail, there's nobody around to be grateful. My clients are dead." After a second she added, "I don't take money from kids, even rich kids."

"Have you served in your capacity as 'guide' for Dennis Morgan before?"

"Never met him until he called. He was a friend of a friend."

"You - all three of you - went into this knowing that whoever was near this little boy might be murdered."

She looked at him as though she were trying to decide whether he was intelligent or not. Finally, she said, "An innocent little boy is going to die. You're either somebody who will help him or somebody who won't. For the rest of your life you'll be somebody who did help him or somebody who didn't."

The judge stared down at his desk for a few seconds, his face obscured by the deep shadows. When he looked up, his jaw was tight. "You are a criminal. The system hates people like you. It has special teeth designed to grind you up."

As she watched him, she could see his face begin to set like a death mask. He pressed his intercom button. "Tell the officers to come in." He began to write, filling in lines on a form on his desk.

The two police officers swung the door open quickly and walked inside. The man had his right hand resting comfortably on the handle of the club in his belt.

The judge said, "I've finally straightened this out. Her real name is Mahoney. Colleen Anne Mahoney. She was attacked by those suspects on the way into the courthouse. Apparently it was a case of mistaken identity, because she had no connection with the Phillips case. I'm giving you a release order now, and I want all records - prints, photographs, and so on - sealed... no, destroyed. Call me when it's been done." He handed the female officer the paper. "I want to avoid any possibility of reprisals."

"Will do, Judge," said the policewoman. Kramer's instinct about her was confirmed. She had a cute little smile.

The policeman opened the door for Jane Whitefield, but this time nobody touched her. She didn't move. "You should have those teeth checked."

He shrugged. "The system was never meant to rule on every human action. Some things slip through."

She stared at him for a second, then said simply and without irony, "Thank you, Your Honor," turned, and walked out of his office.

2

Jane Whitefield drove her rental car down Fairfax past the high school, the old delicatessens and small grocery stores and the shops that sold single items like luggage or lamps, beyond the big white CBS buildings and then into the hot asphalt parking lot at Farmers' Market, where she found refuge from the Southern California sun in the cool shadow between two tour buses. The market was crowded on Saturdays, and it took her a few minutes of threading her way among the hundreds of preoccupied people to find the pet store. There were two glass enclosures out front where puppies lay sleeping with their smooth little potbellies in the air.

She bought two cubical birdcages that had one side that could be opened for cleaning, and a two-pound bag of bird feed that was peppered with sunflower seeds. She walked across the market to a craft store where people bought kits for making bead jewelry. She drove out of the market and headed northward toward the hills, but then stopped only a few blocks up when she saw a secondhand store that looked as though it might have the right kind of teddy bear. Then she drove the winding road over Laurel Canyon to the San Fernando Valley, and on across the flats to the campus of the California State University at Northridge. She had been past the school once years ago, and carried a picture of it in her mind. It was the right kind of habitat.

Jane had not done this in years, but she was very good at it. She drove around the nearly empty campus until she found a long drive with a row of tall eucalyptus trees beside it and a few acres of model orchard beyond them. She parked her car in the small faculty parking lot behind some kind of science building and carried her cages to the eucalyptus trees. Nearly everyone on campus seemed to be in a library or dormitory, so she had the luxury of silence while she worked.

She propped open the sides of the cages with sticks that had fallen from the trees, took the food cups from their slots on the bars and filled them with bird feed, then ran thin jewelry wire from the cups to the sticks. She balanced a stone on the open wall of each cage so it would come down fast and stay shut. She sprinkled a handful of bird feed over the carpet of fallen eucalyptus leaves in front of the cages, and went for a walk. She used her sense of the geography of university campuses to find the Student Union, and sat at a table in the shade of a big umbrella at the edge of a terrace to drink a cup of lemonade.

Even at this time of year, Southern California seemed to her to be parched and inhospitable. The broad lawns in public places like this were still a little yellow and sparse from the eight-month-long summer, with its hundred-degree stretches. Back home people would be telling each other stories about years they remembered when the snow didn't stop until May, and wondering if this would be another one. When her lemonade was finished she walked back across the campus to the row of eucalyptus trees. Before she turned the corner of the science building she heard a squawk, and then some fluttering, and she thought about the difference between birds and human beings. No matter how many times it had been done, each new generation of birds flew into the trap as though it had never before happened on earth. Maybe they weren't so different.

She approached the traps, but they didn't look the way she had expected. One of them was just as she had left it, and the other one had two big blue scrub jays in it together. When she moved closer she could see that one was a male and the other female, slightly smaller with more brown on top and less blue. As she stepped to the cage, the questions began. "Jree?" asked the male. "Jree?" The female scolded, "Check check check!"

They weren't like the birds at home, but they were quick and greedy for survival, so territorial and aggressive that they had probably crowded in together without hesitation. It was too late in the year for them to be feeding hatchlings, and having one of each seemed right. They were already mated.

She poured in some more seed to give them something to think about, lifted the cage, put it in the back seat of the car, and covered it with a silk blouse from her suitcase.

Jane drove to the county office building and wiped her face clean of the thick makeup she had been using to hide the bruises, then walked to the Department of Children's Services. The people in the office were busy in a way that showed they had given up hope of ever doing all they were supposed to do but were keeping on in the belief that if they worked hard enough they would accomplish some part of it. There were two empty desks for each one that had a person behind it, so they moved from one to another picking up telephones and slipping files in and out of the piles like workers tending machines in a factory. She waited for a minute, then saw a woman hang up her telephone and pause to make a note in a file.

Jane stepped forward. "Excuse me," she said. "I need to leave something for Nina Coffey."

The woman's eyes rolled up over the rim of her glasses and settled on Jane; her head, which was still bent over the papers on the desk, never moved. Jane could tell that her bruises had identified her as an abused mother. "How can I help you?"

"It's this teddy bear," said Jane. "Timmy Phillips left it in my car."

The woman showed no recognition of the name. She snatched a gummed sticker out of the top drawer and put her pen to it. "Spell it," she said.

"P-H-I-L-L-I-P-S. I'd appreciate it if you got it to her, because it's important to Timmy." Jane handed the woman the small, worn brown teddy bear.

The woman turned her sharp gaze through the glasses at the bear. "I can see that," she said. "Don't worry. I'll give it to her."

"Thanks," said Jane warmly.

The telephone rang and the woman held up one finger to signal that Jane was to wait while she answered it, but Jane turned away. She heard the woman call, "Mrs. Phillips?" but she was out the door.

Jane waited down the street from the parking garage. She had seen the row where the employees' parking spaces were, and now she parked at the curb where she could watch them.

It was not long before she saw the woman she had been waiting for. Nina Coffey was in her forties and very slight with red hair that was fading into a gray that muted it. Jane saw that she had the habit of holding her keys in one fist when she came out of the elevator, so she suspected that this was a woman whose profession had given her a clear-eyed view of the planet she was living on. In her other hand she held a hard-sided briefcase and a teddy bear.

Jane waited for her to start her car, drive to the exit, and move off down the street before she pulled her own car out from among the others along the block. She followed Nina Coffey at a distance, and strung two other cars between them so she wouldn't get too accustomed to the sight of Jane's. Coffey turned expertly a couple of times, popped around a corner and then up onto a freeway ramp, and Jane was glad she had put the other cars between them so that she had time to follow in the unfamiliar city.

She pushed into the traffic and over to the same lane that Coffey chose and stayed there, letting a couple of other cars slip in between them again. Coffey turned off the freeway in a hilly area that the signs said was in Pasadena, and Jane had to move closer. There seemed to be stoplights at every intersection, and Nina Coffey was an aggressive driver who had a knack for timing them. After the third one, Jane had to stop while Coffey diminished into the distance. She turned right, then left, then sped up five blocks of residential streets that had no lights, turned left, then right again to come out three blocks behind her.

Finally Nina Coffey came to a street where she had to wait to make a left turn, and Jane caught up with her again. When Coffey stopped in front of a modest two-story house with a brick facade, Jane kept going. As she passed, she studied the car that blocked the driveway and knew it was the right house. The car was a full-sized Chevrolet painted a blue as monotonous as a police uniform.

The authorities had done exactly as Jane had hoped they would. They were protecting Timmy from everybody, without distinction - the people who wanted him declared dead, the reporters, people who were sure to search the family tree to suddenly discover they were relatives - and without comment. They had put Timmy in the home of a cop while the mess around him was sorted out.

She spent fifteen minutes driving around the neighborhood to look for signs that anyone else had found the house. She saw no parked cars with heads in them, no nearby houses with too many blinds drawn, and no male pedestrians between twenty and fifty. She came back out on Colorado Boulevard satisfied and drove up two streets before she found the place where she wanted to park her car She had to climb over the fence at the back of the yard and crouch in the little cinderblock enclosure where the pool motor droned away and stare in the back window until she saw Timmy. She watched him eat his dinner in the kitchen with two other children, and then begin to climb the carpeted stairway to the second floor. Upstairs, a light went on for a few minutes and then went out. The other children weren't much older than Timmy was but they were still downstairs. She supposed he was still living on Chicago time, where it was two hours later.

The sun was low when Jane decided how she would do it. She walked quietly to the back of the house. In a moment she was up the fig tree and on the roof of the garage. She walked across it to a second-floor window of the house, tied a length of the jewelry wire into a loop, inserted it between the window and the sill, and slowly twirled it until she had it around the latch. She gave a sharp tug to open the latch, quietly slid the window up, and slipped into the upstairs hallway.

When she opened the bedroom door Timmy was lying on his side looking at her, his coffee-with-cream eyes reflecting a glint of the light coming from the hallway, his child-blond hair already in unruly tufts from burrowing into the pillow. Somebody had bought him a new pair of pajamas with pictures of fighter planes in a dogfight all over them, and had at least looked at him closely enough to be sure they fit his long legs. He held the teddy bear on the sheet beside him. "Jane?" he said.

"Hello, Timmy," she whispered. "Can't sleep?"

"I'm tired, but it's still light, and I keep thinking about them. Mona and Dennis."

"I thought you might want to go to their funeral."

"I did want to, but they said I couldn't."

"So we'll have our own."

The shadows of the trees at the edge of the vast cemetery were already merging into the dusk, but the sky to the west had a reddish glow. Jane had sent two big displays of white roses in case she and Timmy arrived after dark, but the flowers weren't necessary. It was still light enough to find the two fresh graves on the hillside.

The bodies of Dennis and Mona would be shipped to London and Washington for burial, but Jane had searched the funeral notices in the newspaper and found a pair of brothers who had been killed in a car accident and had been buried today. As they walked up the hill Timmy said, "What are we going to do?"

Jane shrugged. "We can only do what we know. The kind of funeral I know best is the kind my family did for my father, my mother, and my grandparents."

They stopped at the head of the graves. Jane said, "One thing we always did was to have close friends or relatives say something to them."

"How?"

"Just talk to them."

Timmy looked down at the two mounds of dirt for a moment, then said, "I don't know what to say."

"Then I'll go first," Jane said. "Dennis and Mona? We're here to say goodbye to you, and to tell you that there are people who know and understand who you were and what you did. We saw it. You spent your lives protecting and caring for people who needed help: little children, and people who were going to court and didn't have anybody to speak for them. You died fighting enemies you knew were bigger and stronger, trying to give us time. We're here because we want you to see that we're okay. You won." She nudged Timmy. "Ready to say something?"

Timmy said, "Mona, I'll... I'll miss you. It's lonely here. I didn't know you weren't coming back. I would have said something..." His voice trailed off.

"What would you have said?" asked Jane.

"I... guess... 'I love you.'"

"That's good."

"And I would have thanked her. But I can't now. It's too late."

"You just did," said Jane. "Those are the two things that had to be said."

Jane knelt on the grass and used her hands to dig a hole in the soft mound of earth over the first grave. Then she reached into her purse.

"What are you doing now?"

"Well, the Old People believed that after somebody died, he had to make a long trip to a place where he would be happy all the time. They figured it took a long time to get there, so they tried to give him presents that would make the trip easier. Weapons, food, that kind of thing."

She held up a new Mont Blanc fountain pen and said, "This is like the one Dennis carried in his briefcase, but the police have that. We'll let it stand for the weapon." She pulled out a credit card and put it beside the pen. "This is the way people travel now."

At the other grave she dug a second hole and placed a credit card and four granola bars in the bottom.

"What's that?" asked Timmy.

"Mona wasn't the sort of person who thought much of weapons. She loved to feed people, so she would like this better." Jane stood and brushed the dirt off her hands. "Now cover them up."

As Timmy worked to pack the dirt over the little holes, Jane went to the car and brought back the birdcage.

"What's in there?"

She took the blouse off the cage and the scrub jays glared around them suspiciously, the white streaks above their shining black eyes looking like raised eyebrows.

"Birds!" said Timmy.

"The Old People did this, so maybe it works." She spoke to the birds. "Mr. and Mrs. Bird, we have the souls here of two very brave and noble people. They had a lot of reasons why they must have wanted to run away from danger, because they loved each other very much, just like you do. But they did the hard thing instead. I want you to carry them up to Hawenneyugeh. Will you do it?"

The birds jumped back and forth on the perches calling "Check-check-check," uneasy about the low level of the sun.

Jane said, "Mona, it's time to go. Have a short trip. You did your work well. You were a wonderful woman." She grasped the female scrub jay gently, holding her on her back and stroking her breast feathers as she stood over the grave, then tossed her into the sky. She fluttered about and then flew fifty feet to light on a limb of a magnolia tree.

Jane reached into the cage again and caught the male. "Dennis," she said, "you were a great fighter. Now I wish you peace. Mona is waiting."

The scrub jay flew up and joined the female on the branch of the magnolia. They looked down at Jane and Timmy for a few seconds as though they wanted to be sure there was no plan afoot to molest them further, then flew off to the west toward either the setting sun or the college campus.

"Goodbye," said Timmy. He waved as the birds flew, and kept waving long after they were invisible.

"Ready to go now?"

"I guess so."

They walked back to the car in silence, got inside, and coasted down the hill and out of the cemetery.

"Do you think they heard us?" asked Timmy.

"There's no way to know," said Jane. "The Old People will tell you that they do. What I think is that it doesn't really matter. Funerals aren't for the dead."

"They're not?"

"They're for us, the ones who have to go on."

"You did all this for me, didn't you?"

"For you and for me." She drove on for a few seconds, then admitted, "But mostly for you. For somebody your age you've seen a lot of heartache. Some of it you don't remember already, but you'll remember this. I wanted to be sure you remember it right."

"What should I remember?"

"That you got to live when there were still heroes. Real heroes that feel scared and bleed, and that's the part that gets left out of the books. That's a privilege. Nobody has to read you a story. You saw it."

"I wish they hadn't done it," said Timmy.

"Me too."

Timmy started to cry. At first it was just a welling of tears, but Jane knew the rest of the tears that he had been too exhausted to cry were behind them. She drove to the freeway and kept going beyond Pasadena into bare and unfamiliar hills. After half an hour Timmy stopped crying, and Jane drove until he spoke again. "What's going to happen? They're all gone."

"You don't have to worry about that, because some very smart people are spending all their time taking care of it. Judge Kramer said the court would study your story, learn all they can about you, and appoint somebody to take care of you."

"Will it be you?"

"No," she said. "It will be a family. Somebody like the people you're staying with now. Are they nice?"

"Yes," he said.

Jane let out a breath before she realized she had been holding it. "Well, I've got to get you back there so you can get some sleep."

"Will I see you?"

"Probably not for a long time."

She drove back to Pasadena and parked behind the street where the policeman and his family lived. She climbed to the top of the fence, lifted Timmy and lowered him to the lawn. She could see that the other two children were still watching television downstairs. She led him to the tree, hoisted him to her back, and climbed. When they walked to the open window, Timmy was seized with a panic. "I don't want you to leave."

"I have to, Timmy," she said.

"But what am I going to do? I mean after you're gone."

Jane hesitated, then accepted the fact that she had to try. "Go to school. Make friends. Play games. Try to grow up strong and decent and healthy. That's plenty to do for now." She helped him in the window and sat on his bed while he put on his pajamas.

"But what happens after that? What will I be then?"

"I think that's why it takes so much time to grow up. You don't really make a decision; you just find out when the time comes."

"What would you do?"

Jane shook her head and smiled sadly. "I'm not a good one to ask."

"Who is?"

Jane had an urge to tell him everything she knew, because this would be the last time. No words came into her mind that were of any use, but she had to push him in the right direction. "Well, when I was in college I knew a boy who was in a position sort of like yours. He didn't know what to do, but he knew that if he wasn't careful, he would be lazy and wasteful and selfish."

"What did he decide?"

"He decided to become a doctor. It was the hardest thing he could think of to be, so he knew that would force him to study. And when he had done enough studying, he would know how to do something worthwhile. At the time I thought he was being very sensible. I still can't find anything wrong with the idea."

"Is he a doctor now?"

"As it happens, he is, but that isn't the point. The real reward was that he got to be the kind of person he wanted to be. It doesn't matter whether he ended up a doctor or something else. He had decided to try. That made him special."

There were noises. She heard the first complaints from little voices downstairs. The children were being sent to bed.

"I've got to go now or I'll get caught," she said. She leaned down and kissed his cheek. "Sleep well, Timmy. Remember that people have loved you before and others will love you again, because you're worth it."

As she slipped out the window she heard a whisper. "Jane?"

"Yes?" She stopped and leaned on the sill.

"Thanks for the bear. I knew it was from you."

"I thought you would."

"Are you one of the people? The ones who love me?"

"Of course I am."

"Will you marry me?"

"Sure."

She drifted across the garage roof like a shadow, and seemed to Timmy to fly down the tree without moving a leaf. He watched the back fence, but even in the light of the moon he didn't see her go over it. After listening for a few minutes, he fell asleep.

3

Jane returned the car to the airport rental lot and caught the shuttle bus to the terminal. As she stepped off, she smiled perfunctorily at the efficient skycap offering to check her luggage through to her destination and shook her head. She didn't have luggage and she didn't have a destination. She had made a stop at a Salvation Army office on the way to the airport and disposed of the clothes that had remained in her suitcase that weren't torn or bloodstained, and then had donated the suitcase too. She had known that she would never wear any of the clothes again because they would have reminded her of all that had happened.

She had spent her three days in the county jail ruminating on failure, and her nights remembering the faces of dead people. She should have been quick-witted enough to save Mona and Dennis. There had to be some better way to stop a court case. If nothing else had come to mind, she should have called in a bomb threat to make the police evacuate the courthouse, then arrived during the confusion and attached Timmy and Mona to a squad of policemen. She had not thought clearly because she was so busy trying to get Timmy to the building on time; she had not seen the ambush because she was too busy dragging her clients into it.

In the nighttime, after a day of reliving her failure in her mind, gripped by the shock over and over again as each of her mistakes was repeated, old ghosts crept into her cell. The one she knew best was Harry the gambler. She had hidden him, then made the mistake of believing that the man who had been his friend would not also be his killer. Harry had visited her so often over the years that he had almost become part of her.

One of the ghosts was a man she had never met. She kept remembering the newspaper picture of John Doe. The police artists had needed to touch it up so much that it was more a reconstruction than a photograph. A cop had found him three years ago sprawled among the rocks below River Road. He had five thousand dollars in cash sewn into his suit, a pair of eyeglasses with clear glass lenses, a brand-new hairpiece that didn't match his own hair, and three bullet holes in his head. Jane had watched the newspapers for months, but the police had never learned who he had been or why he was running. Maybe he had not been trying to reach her; perhaps he was just heading for the Canadian border. But his death within a few miles of her house still haunted her.

On the third day in jail, one of the ghosts came to life. The guards had let Jane out into the exercise yard with the other prisoners and she had seen Ellery Robinson. Years ago Jane had taken Ellery Robinson's sister Clarice out of the world to escape a boyfriend who was working his way up to killing her. Jane could remember Ellery's eyes when she had tried to talk her into disappearing with her sister. Ellery had said, "No, thank you. He's got nothing to do with me." For the next few years Jane had often thought about those clear, innocent eyes. Ellery had waited a couple of days while Jane got Clarice far away, then killed the boyfriend. Later Jane had made quiet inquiries for Clarice and learned that Ellery's life sentence meant she would serve four to six years.

After the six years, Jane had kept the memory quiet by imagining Ellery Robinson out of the state prison and living a tolerable life. But here she was, back in county jail. In that moment ten or twelve years ago when Jane had not thought of the right argument, not said the right words, not read the look in those eyes, Ellery Robinson's life had slipped away. Jane looked at her once across the vast, hot blacktop yard, but if Ellery Robinson recognized her, no hint of it reached her face. After that, Jane had not gone out to the yard again. Instead she had sat on her bunk and thought about Timothy Phillips.

As she stepped into the airport terminal she had a sudden, hollow feeling in her stomach. She still had not freed herself of the urge to take Timmy with her. She had recognized the madness of the idea as soon as she had formulated it. The whole purpose of this trip had been to bring Timmy under the protection of the authorities. They weren't going to let him disappear again easily. Even if she succeeded in getting him away, it might be exactly the wrong thing to do. It might make her feel as though she had not abandoned him, but Timmy would lose all that money, and with it, the protection. Maybe in ten years he would hate her for it - if he lived ten years. Jane had not even been good enough to keep Mona and Dennis alive. No, Timmy was better off where he was, with the cops and judges and social workers. She was tired, beaten. It was time to go home, stop interfering, and give the world a vacation from Jane Whitefield.

She walked to the counter and bought a ticket for New York City because it was the right direction and there were so many flights that she didn't expect to have to wait long to get moving again. She used a credit card that said Margaret Cerillo. As the man at the counter finished clicking the keys of the computer and waited for the machine to print out the ticket, she noticed his eyes come up, rest on Jane's face for an instant, and then move away too fast. Jane explained, "I had a little car accident yesterday. Some idiot took a wide left turn on La Cienega and plowed right into me." The last time she had looked, the makeup had covered her injuries well enough, but with the heat and the hurry, the scrapes and bruises must be showing through.

"It must have been... painful," said the man.

"Pretty bad," said Jane. She took the ticket and credit card and walked up the escalator and through the row of metal detectors. She kept going along the concourse until she found an airport shop that had a big display of cosmetics. She selected an opaque foundation that matched her skin tone and some powder and eye shadow. When she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror at the top of a revolving display, she reached below it and picked out a pair of sunglasses with brown-tinted lenses. Then she took her purchases with her into the ladies' room. Her face was still hot and tender from the punches she had taken, and her right hand was aching from the hard blows she had given the men in the hallway, but a little discomfort was better than being noticed.

She looked under the stalls and found she was alone. She was glad, because she wouldn't have to pretend that what she was doing was easy. She leaned close to the mirror and dabbed on the foundation painfully. The resuit looked tolerable, but it stung for a few seconds. She stopped until the pain subsided a little, and had just begun to work on her eyes when she heard the door open and a pair of high heels cross the floor behind her. She had a pretty vivid black eye from the big guy with the yellow tie who had piled in at the end. It was hard to cover it and make both eyes look the same with a hand that hurt.

"Can I help you with that?"

Jane didn't turn around, just moved her head a little to verify what she guessed about the woman behind her in the mirror. She wasn't surprised that the woman was attractive. Makeup was a personal issue - not quite a secret, but almost - and you had to be pretty spectacular to have the nerve to tell somebody you could do her makeup better than she could. This one was tall - almost as tall as Jane - and almost as thin, but her face had that blushing china-figurine skin that women like her somehow kept into their forties. They were always blond, or became blond, like this one. Every last one of them had switched to tennis after their cheerleading coaches had put them out to pasture, but they must have played it at night, because their skin looked as though it had never seen sunlight.

Jane said. "No, thanks. I can handle the painting. It's the repairs that are hard."

"You don't remember me, do you?" There was tension in the voice.

"No," said Jane. "If I should, then you must be good at this. Maybe I should let you do my makeup after all."

The woman whispered, "I was in the county jail when you were."

Jane turned to look at the woman more closely, this time with a sense that she ought to be watching her hands, not her face. "Well, congratulations on getting out."

Jane waited for her to leave, but the woman just smiled nervously and waited too. "Thanks."

Jane decided that she could do the finishing touches in another ladies' room or even on the plane. "Well, I've got a plane to catch."

"No, you don't. It doesn't leave for an hour. Four-nineteen to New York. I'm on it too. My name is Mary Perkins."

"Are you following me?"

"I was hoping to do better than that."

"What do you mean?"

"There's not much to talk about when you're in jail. There was a girl who had been in court when you were arrested. There was a rumor you had hidden somebody. That sounded interesting, so I asked around to find somebody who could introduce us, but sure enough, all of a sudden they were letting you go under another name. How you managed that I don't want to know."

"You don't?"

"No. I want you to do it for me."

"Why?"

"When I got arrested there were some men following me. That was thirty days ago. I just saw two of them here."

"Why do they want you?"

The woman gave her a look that was at once pleading and frustrated. "Please, I don't have time to tell you my life story and you don't have time to listen to it right now. I have to get out of Los Angeles now - today - only they're already here, and it can't be a coincidence. They're looking for me."

"But who are you?"

"The short answer is that I'm a woman who needs to disappear and has the money to pay whatever it is you usually get for your services."

Jane felt exhausted and defeated. Her head, face, hands, and wrists were throbbing and weak. She looked at the woman who called herself Mary Perkins, and the sight of her face made Jane tired. She had said almost nothing, but Jane was already picking up signs in her eyes and mouth that she had lied about something. She was genuinely afraid, so she probably wasn't just some sort of bait placed in the airport by the people Jane had fought outside the courtroom. But if men were following her at all, they were undoubtedly policemen. Jane thought, No. Not now. I'm not up to this. Aloud, she said, "Sorry."

"Please," said the woman. "How much do you want?"

"Nothing. You have the wrong person. Mistaken identity."

Mary Perkins looked into Jane's eyes, and Jane could see that she was remembering that Jane was injured. "Oh," the woman said softly. "I understand." She turned and walked toward the door.

As she opened the door, Jane said, "Good luck." Mary Perkins didn't seem to hear her.

Jane looked at her face in the mirror. The bruises were covered, but the thick makeup felt like a mask. When she put the glasses on, they reminded her that the side of her nose had been scraped by the buttons on the big guy's sleeve when he missed with the first swing.

She walked out to the concourse and strolled along it with the crowds until she was near Gate 72. She saw the woman sitting there pretending to read a magazine. If she was being hunted, it was a stupid thing to do. Jane walked closer to the television set where they posted flight information. Mary Perkins's eyes focused on Jane, and then flicked to her left. Jane appreciated not being stared at, but then the eyes came back to her, widened emphatically, and flicked again to the left. Jane stopped for a moment, opened her purse, turned her head a little as though she were looking for something and studied the two men to Mary Perkins's left. If they were hunters they were doing a fairly good job of keeping Mary Perkins penned in and panicky. The short one was sitting quietly reading a newspaper about fifty feet from Mary Perkins, and the big one was pretending to look out the big window at the activity on the dark runway. She could see he was watching the reflection instead, but that wasn't unusual. Her eyes moved down to the briefcase at his feet. It was familiar, the kind they sold in the gift shop where she had bought the makeup.

The smaller man had no carry-on luggage. He sat quietly with his newspaper, not looking directly at Mary Perkins. He had to be the cut-off man, the one she wasn't supposed to notice at all until the other man came for her and she bolted. They couldn't be cops, or they would already have her. She had already bought her ticket, and a plane ticket was proof of intent to flee.

Jane felt spent and hopeless. She admitted to herself that if she got home safely she would find herself tomorrow going to a newsstand and picking up a Los Angeles Times and the New York papers to look for a story about a woman's body being found in a field. These two were going to follow Mary Perkins until, inevitably, she found herself alone.

Jane walked back down the concourse, raising her eyes to look at the television monitors where the departing flights were posted, never raising her head and never slowing down. By the time she had passed the third monitor she had made her selection. There was a Southwestern Airlines flight leaving for Las Vegas five minutes after the flight to New York. She went down the escalator, walked to the ticket counter and paid cash for two tickets to Las Vegas for Monica Weissman and Betty Weissman. Then she returned to the gate where Mary Perkins was waiting. She sat down a few seats from her, counted to five hundred, then stood up again.

She walked close to Mary Perkins on the way to the ladies' room. As she did, she waggled her hand behind her back, away from the two watchers.

She waited inside the ladies' room in front of the mirror until Mary Perkins came in. "Did you check any luggage onto the plane for New York?"

"I don't have any," said Mary Perkins. "As soon as I got out I came here."

"Good," said Jane. "When we get out of here, stay close but don't look at me. You never saw me before. One of those guys will be standing between you and the exits. The other one will have moved to a place where he can see his buddy signal him." She handed Mary Perkins the ticket for Las Vegas.

She looked down at the ticket. "Las Vegas? How does this change anything?"

"Just listen. When it's time to board, one of them will go to a telephone to tell somebody at the other end that you're on the plane. It's a five-hour flight with a stop in Chicago, and that gives them time to do everything but dig your grave before we get there. The other will sit tight until the last minute."

"But what are we going to do? What's the plan?"

Jane looked at her wearily. "The plan is to go to Las Vegas and make them think you've gone to New York. Now give me about the time it takes to sing the national anthem before you come out. Then go sit where you sat before."

Jane swung the door open. Instead of looking toward the waiting area, she glanced behind her for the one watching the exit. The man with the paper was loitering a few yards away at the water fountain. She turned and saw that the other one had taken a seat where he could watch his friend. There was a certain comfort in seeing that they were predictable.

Jane sat a few yards behind the man with the briefcase and studied him. He couldn't be armed with anything worse than a pocketknife. Three inches or less, if she remembered the regulation correctly. They weren't going to do anything in an airport anyway. People you didn't know wouldn't commit suicide to kill you. These were hired help for somebody.

The woman at the boarding desk was joined by a second woman, who said something to her. Then the one who had given Jane her boarding pass picked up a microphone and cooed into it, "Flight 419 for New York is now ready for boarding." People all over the waiting area stood up. "Will those passengers with small children, or who need help boarding, please come to the gate now...."

That invitation seemed to apply to no one, so as the woman went on - "Passengers in rows one through ten may board now" - the taller man walked to the row of telephones beside the men's room.

Mary Perkins stirred, but Jane gave her head a little shake and picked up a newspaper someone had left on a seat near her. The woman went on calling out rows of seats, then said, "Passengers in the remaining seats may board now." Still Jane sat and stared at the newspaper. There were four minutes left. When there were three minutes, she closed the newspaper and began to walk toward the gate.

In her peripheral vision she saw Mary Perkins stand up and follow, then saw the taller man hurriedly punch some numbers into the telephone. Jane stopped to glance up at the clock on the wall, and saw the smaller man walking along behind Mary Perkins. The man at the telephone had hung up, and he walked straight to the gate, handed the woman his ticket, and entered the tunnel. Jane walked a few feet past the last set of seats in the waiting area slowly, letting Mary Perkins catch up with her. At the last second, she turned to her.

"Why, Mary," she said. "It is you."

Mary Perkins stopped and stared at her in genuine shock. "Well... yes."

"You don't remember me, do you?"

The man who had been following Mary Perkins stopped too, standing almost behind them. Jane seemed to notice him for the first time. "Oh, don't mind us. Go ahead." She pulled Mary Perkins aside. "It's me, Margaret Cerillo. I thought I recognized you before, but I wasn't sure..."

The man hesitated. He obviously had orders to follow Mary Perkins onto the airplane, but he also had been instructed to be sure he wasn't caught doing it. He could think of no reason to stand and wait for these two women while they talked, so he stepped forward, handed his ticket to the woman at the door, and stepped past her into the boarding tunnel.

Jane moved Mary Perkins away from the gate casually. "Slowly, now, and keep talking," Jane whispered. "You seem to be worth a lot of expense."

"I guess they think I am," said Mary Perkins.

"If you have something they want, you'll never have a better time to come up with it. We can go right into the plane and make a deal. The lights are on and everybody's been through metal detectors. There's no chance of other people we can't see."

"If I had anything to buy them off with, what would I need you for?"

Jane stopped and looked at her. "I'll still help you shake them afterward in case there are hard feelings."

"Thanks, but I can't get rid of them that way."

"What did you do?"

Mary Perkins turned to look at Jane, leaning away from her as though she had just noticed her there and found it displeasing. "Why do you assume I did something?"

"I know you did. If you didn't, what would you need me for?"

Jane began to walk again. Any woman whose claim to trust was that she had picked up some gossip in the L.A. county jail didn't inspire much confidence, and this one struck her as a person who had done some lying professionally. But Jane could see no indication of what she was lying about. She was being followed by two men who had not taken the sorts of steps that anybody would take if they wanted to stop her from jumping bail or catch her doing something illegal. They had seen her waiting for a flight to a distant state, and they had gotten aboard. The local cops couldn't do that, the F.B.I, wouldn't be prepared to do it on impulse, and if none of them had stopped her from leaving the county jail, then they didn't know of any reason to keep her there.

Jane had to admit to herself that the only possibility that accounted for the way these men were behaving was that they wanted to keep her in sight until there weren't any witnesses. "A little faster now," she said. "We've got a plane to catch."

They started across the waiting area and Jane caught a peculiar movement in the edge of her vision. A man sitting at the far end of the waiting area stood up, and two men who had been conferring quietly at a table in the coffee shop did the same. It wasn't that any of them would have seemed ominous alone. It was the fact that their movements coincided with Jane's and Mary's starting to walk fast. "Did you hear them announce a flight just now?"

Mary winced. "Please don't tell me you hear voices."

"I don't. There were two men on that flight. Do you have some reason to believe there wouldn't be others?"

"Well... no."

Jane's jaw tightened. "Let me give you some advice. Whatever it is you've been doing that makes people mad at you, cut it out. You're not very good at getting out of town afterward."

Mary Perkins let Jane hurry her along the concourse in silence until they reached Gate 36. They slipped into the tunnel with the last of the passengers, just as the man at the gate was preparing to close the door. Jane heard running footsteps behind her, so she stopped at the curve and listened.

"I'm sorry, sir," said the airline man's voice. "You'll need a ticket. We aren't permitted to accept cash."

"Can't I buy one?"

"Yes, sir, but you'll have to go to the ticket counter. I have no way to issue a ticket."

"But that's way the hell on the other end of the airport. Can you hold the plane?"

"I'm sorry, sir, but passengers have to catch connecting flights, and we have a schedule. There are five flights a day from LAX to McCarran. You could - "

Jane walked the rest of the way up the tunnel and through the open hatch, and she and the woman took their seats. Mary Perkins said, "What do you call that?"

"Airport tag," said Jane. "I haven't played it in years." She sat back, fastened her seat belt, and closed her eyes. "I hope I never do again."

4

"What are you thinking?" asked Mary Perkins.

"I'm not thinking. I'm resting," said Jane.

"Does resting mean you've already thought, and you have a plan? Because if it does, I'd sure like to know what it is."

"No, it means I want you to be quiet."

Jane closed her eyes again. The plane was flying over the Southwest now, toward the places where the desert people lived: Mohave, Yavapai, Zuni, Hopi, Apache, Navajo. Some of them believed that events didn't come into being one after another but existed all at once. They were simply revealed like the cards a dealer turned over in a blackjack game: they came off the deck one at a time, but they were all there together at the beginning of the game.

What Jane needed to do now was to find a way to reveal the cards in the wrong order: go away, then arrive. She reviewed all of the rituals that were followed when an airplane landed. The fact that they were known and predictable and unchanging meant that they already existed, even though the plane was still in the air. The flight was a short one, and she felt the plane begin to descend almost as soon as it had reached apogee. It was just a hop over the mountains, really, and then a long low glide onto the plateau beyond.

Jane reached into the pocket on the back of the seat in front of her and examined the monthly magazine the airline published. She leafed past the advertisements for hotels and resorts and the articles on money, cars, children, and pets. At the back she found the section she was looking for. There were little maps of all of the airports where the airline landed, so people could find their connecting gates. She studied the one for McCarran, then tore the back cover off, reached into the seat pocket in front of Mary, and tore that back cover off too.

"What are you doing?" asked Mary.

Jane pulled her pen out of her purse and began printing in bold capital letters. "Here's what you have to do. When the plane lands, everybody is going to get off except you. You take as much time as you can. You're sick, or your contact lens fell out. I don't care what it is."

"How long?"

"Try to stretch it out long enough to get at least one flight attendant to leave the plane first. It may not work, but I've seen it happen, and when it does, people watching for a passenger get confused."

"Okay," said Mary. "Then what?"

"Then you come off the plane. Walk out fast, don't look to either side. Head for the car-rental desk. Rent a car. Make it a big one, not a compact. Something fat and luxurious and overpowered. They'll probably have lots of them in Las Vegas. Drive it around to the edge of the building where you can see the Southwest baggage area. When I come out the door, zoom up fast and get me."

"What if something goes wrong?"

Jane was busy going over and over the printing on her two sheets, making the letters bigger and bolder. "Here's what it will be. They'll follow you to the car desk. They'll stick around long enough to be sure what you're doing, and then they'll leave to try to get to the lot before you do. The lot will be the first time you're alone and away from airport security. They'll want to get into the car with you."

"Then what do I do?"

Jane looked at her in disappointment. "As soon as they're gone, cancel the car and go to the next desk, of course. Rent from a different company. They'll take you to a different lot."

"Just let me get it straight. Stay on the plane, get off quick, rent a big car, pick you up at baggage."

"Right." She looked up at Mary critically. "Come to think of it, even if you don't spot anybody behind you at the rental counter, cancel the car and go to the next desk anyway."

"You don't think I'll see them, do you? That's it, isn't it?"

Jane stuck the two magazine covers into her belt under her coat at the small of her back. Then she leaned back and closed her eyes again. "Bet your life on it if you want. Either way I'll come out of the baggage door and look for you. If you don't come, I can probably find a cab."

When the pilot's voice came on the intercom and said something inaudible that contained the words Las Vegas, Jane opened her eyes. People ahead of her in the plane were looking out their windows and nudging each other. Probably they were beginning to see the lights. Flying into Las Vegas after dark was always a strange experience. The world below the plane was as black as the sky above it, and then suddenly, with no warning, there was a light like a frozen explosion in the middle of it: not just a lot of dull yellowish bulbs like the lights of other cities, but crimson, aquamarine, veridian, gold, and bright splashes of white. As the plane descended, the lights moved, blinking, flashing, and sweeping, and a line of fan-shaped beams of car headlights were visible flowing up and down in the middle of it. The explosion had gotten even crazier in the past couple of years, she noticed.

Mary was staring out the window like the others. "God, I love this place," she said. "Are we going to be here long?"

"Not unless you're held over by popular demand," said Jane, and closed her eyes again. She listened and let her body feel the machinery of the plane work. The ailerons moved to tilt and swing the plane around, and then the right one went down with the left and the plane leveled to skim over the desert. There was the odd whistling noise of the wind holding the plane back, and the engines cut down, and then the noise seemed to get louder for no reason she had ever understood, and then the hydraulic system pushed the wheels down until they locked with a thump, and there was the long sickening feeling of the plane losing altitude. She said, "You okay on everything?"

"Yes," said Mary.

Jane nodded. The best part of the plan was that if Mary Perkins, or whatever her real name was, panicked and ran, they would both have a pretty good chance. Mary Perkins would be behind the wheel of a big, fast car with a good head start. Most of the watchers would still be following Jane.

The plane bounced along the runway, slowed, and taxied to a stop at the terminal. Jane stood up and joined the line of impatient people opening overhead compartments and shuffling along between the seats. She stepped into the boarding tunnel and picked out a man a few paces ahead of her. He was tall and in his mid-forties and had the preoccupied, bored look of a salesman making his rounds.

She hurried until she was at his side, then matched his pace to make it look as though they were together. As soon as they were out of the tunnel and around the corner she separated herself from him and ducked into the gift shop. She took two steps past the entrance and found a baseball cap with las vegas on the crown in sequins and gold thread, and a sweatshirt with a picture of a hand holding five aces. She walked across to the other side wall and picked out a pair of running shorts. The little store didn't sell shoes, but it had some foldable slippers for people whose feet bothered them on long flights. The whole shopping spree took less than a minute, and then she was at the cash register.

She came out the door with her bag of purchases and slipped into the ladies' room. She changed in the stall, dropped her clothes into the trash can, picked up her magazine covers, and then came out again, this time to join the crowd going toward the arrival gates.

As she walked, she checked her watch. Only four minutes had passed since she had stepped off the plane and come out of Gate 10 with the salesman. This time she was in her shorts and sweatshirt, two and a half inches shorter than she had been in her high heels, her tinted glasses gone and her hair in a ponytail through the back strap of her Las Vegas baseball cap.

She moved to Gate 12, directly across the open hallway from Gate 10. The sign over the desk at Gate 12 said, arr: northwest flt 907 los angeles. She sat down in the side row of seats where other people were waiting for Flight 907 to arrive and put the sign she had made on her lap, where it could be seen if somebody were looking. It said in big, black letters, mary perkins.

She saw the two men notice her. They were in the positions they should be in - apart, but watching the people coming off the Southwest flight from Los Angeles at Gate 10. They both wore sportcoats that might have covered the guns they couldn't have on them now. They noticed Jane within a few seconds. They kept glancing across the hallway at her, but neither moved.

At last Jane saw two stewardesses come out of the tunnel at Gate 10 and walk past the two watchers. They were wearing their little uniform jackets and were towing their overnight bags on little carts. Jane's heart began to beat more quickly. Whatever Mary Perkins had done to delay getting off the plane must have been good. If she could only hold out a little longer, Jane would be able to tie the knot in time.

The two men were staring at each other now, silently conferring. The departure of the flight attendants struck them as evidence that they had already watched all the passengers get off the plane at Gate 10. The two women they had been told to watch for had not been among them. But there was a person waiting at Gate 12 holding a sign that said mary perkins. A second flight from Los Angeles was going to arrive at that gate any minute. Obviously they had been given the wrong airline and flight number. The men silently agreed. First one man went to the drinking fountain. When he came back up the concourse, it was to Gate 12, where Jane waited. She pretended not to see him. She looked at her watch, at the clock on the wall, at the carpet.

At last the second man moved. He walked along the window, pretended to see something out on the runway, and moved closer to get a better angle. Then, without seeming to have made a decision, he was in Jane's waiting area. He guessed maybe he hadn't seen anything after all. He looked at his watch and sat down.

Now there was only one more thing. If they were trained, or even if they had an instinct for this sort of work, they would be anxious not to spook her. A woman limousine driver who picked up strangers at airports probably often drove alone at night, and she would be careful to avoid being stalked. The sensible place for them to be was behind her, and fairly far away.

Jane turned to face Gate 12, so the men would move to the spots where she wanted them to be. She let her eyes go up under the brim of her cap and used the reflection in the darkened window to check. Yes, they were perfect now, watching her from behind, not able to see the first gate at all.

She picked up movement behind them. Mary Perkins was not a novice. She was coming out of the accordion tunnel fast. Ten steps across the waiting area, around the corner, and gone.

Jane needed to keep their attention on her, so she stood up and walked toward the gate. She sat down in the closest seat she could find to the gate and held her sign in her lap. She felt her heart begin to beat more slowly. Now time had a little knot in it. and the longer the rest of it took the better. The men were convinced that Mary Perkins's plane was about to arrive, but she was already on her way down to the car-rental counter.

A woman much like the one who had presided over the arrival of Jane's flight announced, "Flight 907 from Los Angeles will be arriving at Gate 12 in approximately four minutes." Jane could already see the lights of the plane shimmying along at the end of the runway. She kept her head motionless so the two men wouldn't get the urge to move again. She could see that the plane was a big one, and this improved her chances considerably.

The plane slowly rolled to the terminal and nuzzled up to the doorway. The ground crew chocked the wheels, the boarding tunnel extended a few feet to touch the fuselage, and the engines shut down. People near Jane began to stand up and congregate near the doorway. Most of the passengers flying into McCarran were strangers, so the crowd of relatives and friends was small.

Jane stood among them. She held up the mary perkins sign while she watched the first few passengers come out. There were some middle-aged couples, some men traveling alone, a couple of grandmothers. Then there were about ten people of both sexes who seemed to be the age of college students, and she remembered there was a college here. Then she saw a pair of women in their early thirties, and one of them was blond.

She had been cradling the mary perkins sign under her chin, and now she flipped the sign over without letting the move be visible from behind. She stepped out where the two women could not help seeing her, and tried to look at them winningly. They read her new sign:

PRIVATE LIMO: ANY HOTEL, THREE DOLLARS.

The blond woman stopped and asked, "Three dollars for both of us, or three each?"

Jane smiled. "If you're both going to the same place, I'll take you for four."

The blonde said, "Caesar's."

"No sweat," said Jane.

The three women walked down the concourse quickly.

Jane didn't look behind her to see if the men were following. She knew they were. She said, "You've been to Vegas before?"

The blonde had appointed herself to do the talking. "Once in a while. Just when we get really sick of behaving ourselves. We gamble, stay up late, and never grade a single paper."

"You're teachers?"

"Yes," said the other one, who had curly brown hair. "As if you couldn't tell by looking."

Jane felt guilty about what she was going to do next, but the truth was that both of them were attractive in a scrubbed-and-deodorized way. "No," she said. "Everybody comes to Vegas. I just drive them around. Once you're here, you're whoever you say you are - at least until your money's gone. I wouldn't have guessed teachers, though. Most people wouldn't."

"Sure," said the blonde.

"Really. Those two guys who gave you the wall-to-wall and roof-to-foundation when you got off the plane. I bet they don't think you're teachers."

The quiet one said, "That's a laugh." As though to prove it, she laughed.

Jane had put the itch in them, and that was enough. At some point in their walk to the baggage area, each of them would turn and look at the two men, trying very hard and very clumsily to be sure she wasn't caught at it. Looking had nothing to do with real interest. It didn't matter if they were nuns, or lesbians in the tenth year of a lifelong relationship. If they were human, they would look. The idea that they were being watched might frighten them or disgust them or make their weekend, but they would look, and when they did, the two men would be sure.

Jane led them to the baggage claim and waited while they tried to spot their suitcases. The dark one said, "Are those the ones? Don't look."

Jane didn't look. She said, "Tall, muscular guy with dark hair and cowboy boots. Shorter one with curly hair. Both in coats, no ties."

"Yes," said the blonde. "The very ones."

Her companion turned to her in surprise. "You looked?"

"Of course I did," said the blonde. "As soon as I heard about it. But I have a feeling they're not our type. Worse luck."

There was more to the quiet one than Jane had expected. "Maybe my type in Las Vegas isn't the same as my type in Woodland Hills." She was joking, but some part of her mind was agitated.

Jane decided not to let them get too curious. "A lot of ugly things happen in this town. Nobody you want to know hangs around in airports looking for a nice date."

The two bags came down and the blonde soberly scooped them both off the track. Jane picked them up and walked toward the exit with the two women at her back. She used the seconds to prepare herself. If Mary Perkins had failed to rent the car in time, or more likely, had rented it and decided not to drive it back into the light and danger of the airport, Jane was going to be left at the curb with two innocents and some men who might consider this a good opportunity to push them into the back of a car.

She stepped out the door into the cool desert air, set the bags down on the sidewalk, and looked around her. She was careful not to look behind her for the two men, but she knew they must be coming closer. Then a car swung out from the loading zone for United Airlines a hundred yards away and glided toward them. It was a black Lincoln Town Car, and as it drew nearer, she could see Mary Perkins behind the wheel, her face set in an expression of intense discomfort. She stopped two feet from the curb in front of Jane.

The order and economy of Jane's movements were critical now. As soon as the car stopped she swung open the back door and said, "Hop in." As soon as the two women were inside she pushed the button down and slammed the door. Scooping somebody off a curb was easy, but dragging them out of a locked car took time and force. She snatched the suitcases off the pavement, scurried to the back of the car, and banged on the trunk. Mary Perkins leaned out the window and tossed her the key. She set the suitcases inside, closed the lid, and looked around her as she ran to the driver's side. She couldn't see them anywhere, which meant they were somewhere nearby getting into their own car. "I'll drive," she said.

Mary Perkins barely had time to slide to the passenger seat before Jane was inside and wheeling the big car out into the loop. She drove fast to be sure the two men thought it was worthwhile to keep her in sight. She swung to the right on Las Vegas Boulevard. The Strip began just past the airport entrance, and already she was gliding past big hotels: Excalibur, Tropicana, Aladdin, Bally's on the right, the Dunes on the left. They stopped for the light at Flamingo Road, but she still couldn't pick out the car that must be following somewhere in the long line of headlights. The light changed and she drove the two hundred yards with the bright moving lights of the Flamingo Hilton on her right and Caesar's parking lot on the left, then pulled into the long approach to the front entrance.

The blonde said, "How do you make any money on four dollars a trip?"

Jane shrugged. "Lots of hotels, lots of flights, and nothing shuts down, so we work long hours. We take turns driving." She turned to Mary Perkins. "That reminds me. If you want to take a nap, this is a good time."

Mary took the hint and leaned back in the big front seat. "Thanks," she said. She arranged herself so that her head didn't show over the headrest.

Jane stopped the car at the Caesar's front entrance and ran to open the trunk. The doorman opened the back door for the two passengers while a bellman picked up their suitcases. The doorman made a move to reach for Mary Perkins's door, but Jane stopped him. "She's not getting out."

The blond woman said "Thanks" to Jane, handed her seven dollars, and followed the suitcases toward the lobby.

Jane said to the doorman, "I saw a couple of creeps pick those two out at the airport and follow us. I didn't want to scare them, but you might want to tell Security."

The doorman said seriously, "Yeah. Thanks. I'll do it." He went to his station at the side of the door and picked up a telephone.

Jane slipped behind the wheel and started the car. "Keep your head down," she said. "No matter what happens, stay down and out of sight." She watched for the two men as she glided back along the driveway to the strip. When she saw a dark blue car stop at the side of the building, she kept it in the mirror until she saw the men from the airport get out. They would waste the next few hours trying to find the two women in the enormous hotel complex, then watch them for a while. They would receive no help from anybody who worked at the hotel, and sooner or later two or three polite men in dark suits who had been watching them through the network of video cameras and the see-through mirrors in the ceilings would ask them what they wanted.

"Can I get up yet?" asked Mary Perkins.

"Yeah," Jane said. "I guess it's okay now."

Mary Perkins sat up and looked through the windshield. "That's the airport up ahead. I thought we were going to drive out."

"We're not."

"Why not? It's dark and empty, and we could go a hundred."

Jane sighed. "It's the logical thing to do."

They returned the car to the rental lot, walked into the terminal, and bought two tickets for the next flight out. It happened to be to New York with a stop in Chicago. They had to walk quickly to get to the gate in time. It was almost three a.m. now, and any watchers would have had to be disguised as furniture to escape Jane's notice.

As soon as they had taken their seats, Mary Perkins whispered, "I can't believe it. By now those guys don't know where they are, let alone where we are."

"We're alive," said Jane quietly. "Now I'm going to sleep. Don't wake me up until we're in Chicago."

She closed her eyes and prepared herself for the unpleasant experience of having the past few days run through her mind all over again. There were a few bright, crackling images that flashed in her vision, but they weren't in order or coherent, so they didn't cause her much pain. After she had dozed for a short time, she saw the fist coming around just before she had flinched to take the force out of it. The spasmodic jerk woke her up, but when she relaxed her muscles again, she dropped into a deeper animal sleep that put her in darkness far out of reach of recent memories.

5

When the plane began to descend, the pressure on Jane's ears increased and she woke up. The engines changed their tone, and she pushed the button to let her seat back pop up again. The sleep had left her feeling stiff in the shoulders, but she was alert. The Old People believed that the place to obtain secret information was in dreams. Sometimes a dream would be an expression of an unconscious desire of the soul, and at other times a message planted there by a guardian spirit. Those were two ways of saying the same thing. If there were such a force as the supernatural, then the soul and the guardian both would be supernatural. If there were no such force, then the soul was the psyche, and the guardian spirit was just the lonely mind's imaginary friend.

This time Jane could not remember any impression that had passed through her mind in three hours. Maybe that was the message from her subconscious: enough. She had stored enough tragedy and violence in her memory during the past few days to trip the circuit breaker and turn the lights out. The rest had helped: she was thinking clearly again. As they walked into the terminal at O'Hare she glanced up at a monitor that had the schedule of arrivals and departures on it.

"More tag?" asked Mary Perkins.

Jane kept her moving. "Once a game starts, you have to play to win. That means remembering all the moves. We sent two men to New York with a stop in Chicago. The two we left in Las Vegas can look at the schedule and see that a plane left for Chicago about the time we did. When you start sending the chasers across your own path, it's time to get off the path."

They walked along with the crowd heading for the baggage claim until it passed the car-rental counters, and then Jane led Mary Perkins aside. Within minutes they were in a white Plymouth moving along the 294 Expressway toward Route 80.

Jane drove fast but kept the pace steady, always in a pack of cars that were going the same speed. She counted as she drove: two men fooled into boarding the flight to New York, three left at the gate in L.A. two following the wrong woman in Las Vegas. Seven. The one who had made a phone call before he had boarded the plane to New York must have been reporting to somebody, so it was more than seven. Who were they, and why was Mary Perkins worth all this trouble?

"Where are we going?" asked Mary Perkins.

"Detroit," said Jane. "It's about three hundred miles." She turned her head and pointedly studied the right-hand mirror to check for headlights coming up in the right lane. "In the airport you said you didn't have time to tell me anything and I didn't have time to listen. We've got about five hours."

Mary Perkins sat in silence for a long time. They passed an exit where a blazing neon sign towered above a building much bigger than the gas stations around it. Mary gave a little snort that was the abbreviation for a laugh. "Jimmy Fugazi's End Zone Restaurant. Did you ever notice that all those guys who get too old to play buy restaurants?"

This time Jane did look at her. Mary was probably in her thirties, but she was already paying too much attention to her hair and skin and clothes. "I guess they have to invest their money somewhere," she said.

"All professional athletes want to own restaurants," Mary Perkins pronounced. "It doesn't have to do with money. It has to do with not being able to give up having people look at them and pay attention. Even the dumbest jock in the world knows he can do better by putting bets on any ten mutual funds, but all professional athletes want a restaurant. Every crook already has one. What he wants is a casino. A crook is basically lazy, and that way people come to him to get robbed, and they bring it in cash so he can take it and screw the government at the same time. There's only one game bigger than that."

Jane could sense that Mary Perkins was backing closer to whatever she had been concealing, so she waited patiently.

"What happened to me," said Mary Perkins, "well, not exactly to me - but what happened was that one day in 1982 Congress passed the Garn-Saint Germain Act. It pretty much got rid of all the rules for savings and loan companies. They could charge what they wanted, pay what they wanted, buy and sell what they wanted, take deposits in any amount from anywhere, and then lend it to whomever they wanted, or even forget about lending and invest it themselves. I could see that this was maybe the first great opportunity in American life since the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, so I jumped at it."

She glanced at Jane to see if her expression had changed, but it had not, so she went on. "It wasn't only that the rules had changed, but that there was nobody to enforce them. That was part of the program. If you don't have regulations, you don't have to hire regulators. Reagan was cutting the size of the government payroll."

Jane had finally learned something true about Mary Perkins. She was a thief. But until she knew more about what Mary Perkins had stolen, there would be no way to know who was after her. "'What did you have to do with savings and loans?"

"I started working in one right out of college. When I got there, the regulators still knew all the players and all the rules were fifty years old. The money coming in was all from local people with passbooks, and the money going out was for mortgages on local one-family houses."

"I take it you were one of the ones who changed all that?"

"No, not little me. I just came to the party. That's what it was like - a party. You have to understand what was happening. One day the rules change, so each savings and loan sets its own rates. The next day, deposit brokers start taking money from everywhere in the world, breaking it down into hundred-thousand-dollar chips and depositing the chips in whatever institution anywhere in the country had the highest interest that day. So if Bubba and Billy's Bank in Kinkajou, Texas, gives an extra quarter point, suddenly it's got millions of dollars being deposited: Arab oil money, skim-off money from business, drug money from L.A. and Miami, Yakuza money from Japan, money the C.I.A. was washing to slip to some tyrant someplace, and lots of tax money."

"Wait. You did say 'tax money'?" Maybe Jane had been wrong about the men in the airport. If they were federal agents of some kind, they might be prepared in advance to follow a woman like this.

"Sure. You think they keep it in a big box under the president's bed? Say there's a billion-dollar budget for some program. It's got to be in short-term CDs so they can use it when they need it. A loan broker pops it in wherever the interest is highest. Haifa year's interest on a billion dollars at eight percent is forty million, right?"

"If you say so."

"And this is money that can't rest. It can't stay put if there's another bank that's offering higher interest. One point of interest on one billion is ten million dollars. There were all kinds of city-government funds, college budgets, whole states that got their money a few months before they spent it. They counted on the timing and figured the interest in as a way to stretch it. And it didn't matter if the money was in the Bank of America or the Bank of Corncob, Iowa, because it was all insured."

"How did this create an opportunity for you?"

"Forget about me for a minute. A few other things had to change first. Glockenspiel City Savings is suddenly a happening thing."

"What's Glockenspiel City Savings?"

"You know, the little storefront with a million in assets built up over twenty years. One day they offer a nice rate on their CDs; the next week they've got four hundred million in deposits. That happened a hell of a lot more often than you'd think. There are little pitfalls, though. They're offering, say, nine percent. That means they've got to turn maybe ten, even twelve to make a profit. There's very little in Glockenspiel City that you can invest in that pays ten percent, and nothing at all that you can invest four hundred million in. So you've got to invest it the way you got it. in the great wide world outside Glockenspiel City,"

Mary Perkins was telling all this with relish, as though she weren't sitting in a car speeding across the dark Midwest to keep her alive. She seemed to be calming herself by wandering in territory that was familiar to her, a place that was filled with numbers. Jane let her talk.

"Glockenspiel Savings is run by a guy named Cyrus Curbstone. He goes along for years and years, paying three percent on savings, charging six percent on loans. He knows his limits because they've been written down in a law since the thirties. He's honest. He was born there, and he's got two plots in the cemetery for him and Mrs. Curbstone, right behind Great-grandma and one row over from Colonel Curbstone, who got shot in the ass at Gettysburg. But I know Cyrus Curbstone is vulnerable."

"You said he was honest. What's his weakness?"

"One day Cyrus wakes up and finds himself on another planet. He's got to pay nine percent and charge twelve. His million-dollar bank suddenly has four hundred million in deposits. He can't invest it fast enough in the usual way to make the forty or fifty million he needs to turn a profit. In walks a nice person: maybe me. Maybe I've been referred to him by a deposit broker who's been putting lots of those hundred-thousand-dollar chips in the bank. Or I simply happened to meet one of his regular customers socially. Anyway, I'm a developer, or the general partner in a limited partnership. I've got a piece of land that's been appraised for twenty million, I want to develop it as a resort, and I need a loan of ten million to finance it."

"Is the land real?"

"Sure. That doesn't mean I own it, or that it's worth anything like twenty million."

"Didn't they look at deeds?"

"Sure. The owner is Pan-Financial Enterprises of San Diego, or Big Deals of Boca Raton. I'm an officer."

"How did you make it look like it was worth twenty million?"

"In those days there was no licensing law for appraisers anywhere in the country. So I'd get an appraisal that said what I wanted. Then we'd do a land-flip."

"What's that?"

"Buy it for a million. Sell it to your brother-in-law for six million. He sells it back to you for ten. You sell it to Big Deals, Inc. for twenty."

"That worked?"

"Of course it worked. They've been doing it since the Romans."

"If it was that stale, wasn't it risky?"

"You've heard of the term 'motivated seller'?"

"Yes."

"Well, the day after Cyrus Curbstone starts getting these brokered deposits, he becomes a motivated lender. He's got four hundred million to lend out. If he makes ten percent, that's forty million a year. He pays his depositors nine percent, or thirty-six million, pays his overhead, and he's got maybe two million left in profit. He's part owner, or at least a big stockholder. The others are local people, friends of his. He wants that profit. But if he lets the deposits sit in the vault, he's losing three million a month. That's a hundred thousand a day. That's almost forty-two hundred an hour. I mean, it's costing this guy thirty-three thousand dollars to sleep eight hours."

"You're saying Cyrus fooled himself."

"No. Cyrus had never played for big numbers before, but he wasn't stupid. I was a nice, personable businesswoman. I dressed well. I smelled good, I smiled, I had money. I had a hot business and I wanted to expand. Hot businesses need banks. Banks need hot businesses. He got fooled because he was doing exactly what he was supposed to do: for the first few years, a great company looks exactly like the company I was showing him. So he cut a check."

"But what if - "

"What if he said no? If Cyrus didn't bite, I'd leave him to somebody who had a pitch he liked better, and I'd go after his buddy Homer in the next town, who by now has five hundred million to move. But we hardly ever had to do that. Cyrus would have had to hunt pretty hard for a reason to turn me down, and he knew he didn't have time to hunt. He had to find jobs for his dollars."

"So you got a loan. What then?"

"Big Deals, Inc. got a loan. Big Deals spent it: building expenses, salaries, et cetera. But Big Deals neglected to pay the interest."

"What did Cyrus do about it?"

"I'll skip a few phone calls, meetings, and threats. Usually that went on for months. At some point Cyrus sees that he's got a problem. He can do several things. One is to foreclose on the land. Fine with me. I just sold a one-million-dollar chunk of Manitoba for ten million. Another is to accept my excuses and roll over the loan into a new one that includes the interest I owe him. Now it's a new loan for eleven million. Some of these banks carried loans like that for five years."

"What for?"

"Because Cyrus hasn't lost any money until he reports the loan as nonperforming. If he makes a new loan, he not only hasn't lost the ten million, he can put out another million as an asset. This satisfies the regulators, if any should ever get around to Cyrus with all the work they've got. It keeps the bank looking healthy, so Cyrus has breathing space."

"Why does he need such expensive breathing space?"

"Because he didn't make the forty million he needed to turn a profit. If he was a very quick learner, he made maybe thirty-five million: eight and three-quarters percent. He's still got to pay nine percent to the depositors, so he's maybe a million in the hole at the end of the first year. From one point of view that's not bad. It cost a million dollars to make his bank four hundred times as big as it was last year. But now he's on a treadmill that's going faster and faster. He needs to attract more brokered deposits so he can make more loans. If he gets another two hundred million, he can bring back maybe fifty or sixty million next year and easily absorb the million dollars he lost. As I said, he's not stupid. He knows that he looks great on paper as long as he's moving fast. But if somebody takes a photograph - that is, stops the action and studies it - his bank is insolvent. So now he's interested in keeping the system in motion."

There was still something missing from the story Mary Perkins was telling: who were the seven men following her? "By men he must have known you weren't going to pay the money back."

"In a way they all knew too much. See, Cyrus has been around long enough to have seen problems come and go - the oil crisis and the stock market slide in the early seventies, the inflation after that. He's a survivor. There was no question this wasn't going on forever. If he rode it out, then when it ended he'd be on top of a big company and could count the change later. But if he stopped now, he was out of business. Sometimes these guys would do anything to keep the money moving through - loan anything to anybody and then cook the books to keep the loan from going bad."

"So you got big loans and walked away with the money."

"That was my specialty. There were other people who made a lot of headlines by building screwy empires - lending themselves money to build ghost communities in the desert and paying themselves and their families fifty million in salaries for doing it. But what I'm trying to tell you is that it was all going on a long time, and the ones you've read about weren't the only ones who did it. They weren't even the only ones who got caught. They were just the ones who got convicted. They were very unlucky."

"Why unlucky?"

"It meant that one of these overworked low-level federal accountants had to get around to looking at all the loan papers, spot yours, notice there was something really wrong with the loan, ask questions, get the wrong answers, and convince his supervisor to do something about your loan instead of about somebody else's. Even then the procedures were amazing. That stuff we've all heard about the cold-eyed bank examiners popping in at dawn and padlocking everything is a myth. It never happened that way. Not once."

"You're saying it was staged for the television cameras?"

"No, the pictures were real. What you didn't see was what happened first. The regulator asks questions. Six months go by while somebody at the bank dances around. The supervisor sends his first-level letter."

"What's that?"

"They all have names like Notice of Discrepancy or Letter of Caution or Admonition. The letter describes what they found and says they want it fixed. Another six months go by, and the regulator checks the bank again and sees that you didn't fix it. He looks deeper for other problems, or he forces you to agree to move the loan over to the debit column instead of the credit column. Another six months go by and you get the Caution. Then the Admonition."

"That's ludicrous."

"Of course. The regulating procedures were left over from the days when everybody in the business was Cyrus Curbstone. If he got a letter pointing out a discrepancy, he would have been after it like it was a gaping hole in his own roof. The system was set up to say, 'Please look into this,' then 'Have you fixed it?' then 'Okay, here's how you fix it,' then 'If you don't fix it, I will,' and finally, 'Here I come.' "

"You have to wonder how any of these people got caught."

"It was like being chased by a glacier. You could live a whole life without seeing it get any closer. It was coming, sure. But there was so much time to get out of the way."

"And some waited too long."

"Only a few. About a thousand people actually got to the point where they went to trial. This meant that then-savings and loans were so out of control that the government put them at the top of the list for closure. They had to be losing millions a day for that. Then a couple of agents had to figure you were so obviously guilty that it was worth spending four years of their lives preparing the case.

A U.S. attorney had to be sure the case was a slam-dunk, so it wouldn't ruin her won-lost record. Then her boss would have to be convinced that you had stolen so much that when the case was over they could recover enough millions in civil court to repay the millions all this prosecution was costing, and enough millions more to make it look to Joe Taxpayer like they'd gotten his money back, and enough millions more so it would look like they put your head on a pole to scare off the other high rollers."

"How did that work out?"

"Not so great. In order to convict, they had to take the judge and jury through all these loan papers, land-flips, asset appraisals, and files. The average person can barely follow his own taxes. All this paper was written up to fool qualified accountants. The paper made most of these guys look like victims. For all I know plenty of them were. About a third got off. and of the others only about half got convicted of anything that carried jail time. The average sentence was three years."

"You said they were picked so there could be civil suits. Didn't they still have to face that?"

"Sure, but they all said they were broke. Even if they had a hundred million dollars in a box under their bed, they also had papers to show they owed somebody two hundred million."

"I know the government confiscated land and buildings and things. They've been selling them off for years."

"If you read that much, you don't have to ask me how that's going. The savings and loans the government took over were the worst, because that was all they had enough money for. The worst were ones where somebody had pulled land-flips to jack up an acre in the middle of a toxic waste dump from a thousand dollars to a million, and had a shady contractor put a substandard building on it so they could jack up the price of the land all around it."

"It's an interesting story," said Jane, "but it's history. It's been over for years."

"Oh?" said Mary Perkins. "Then let me ask you something. Where is it?"

"What?"

"The money."

"It wasn't real to begin with, was it? If you take something that's worth a thousand dollars and say it's worth a million, and then it goes back to a thousand, nothing happened."

"Something happened. Somebody walked out the door clutching a check for a million dollars he didn't have before, so he got a profit of nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand. The collateral wasn't real, but the money he got from the bank was. He didn't even have to pay taxes on it. A loan isn't income. It's a deduction."

"I forgot about that for a second."

"Sure you did. You're supposed to. Everybody gets used to the idea that money is gooey, flexible stuff. They talk about it inflating and deflating and flowing and being liquid. No reason why it can't evaporate."

"Somebody got it, but if nobody can put his hand on it, then it did evaporate. So that part of it is over."

"It's not over," said Mary Perkins. "We're just moving into the second round now."

"What's the second round? The ten thousand who got away are still doing it?"

"No. Let's say a lull has settled over the borrowing industry. There's no such thing as a savings and loan anymore. The ones that are left are just banks that haven't changed their names yet. That goose has been killed.

Scams always work best in boom times, when everybody's too busy to do much checking, almost any business you say you're in might make a profit, and the value of any kind of collateral is going up. But there's still unfinished business."

"Then what's unfinished?"

"I'll give you another typical case: a guy who got into the borrowing business right after the law changed. He didn't amount to much before that. The government shuts him down in 'eighty-nine or 'ninety when they take over the S and L he was borrowing from. He weasels around during the four years it takes to prepare a noose for him. His lawyer and the prosecutor work out a plea bargain. He'll cooperate in the investigation, do six months for one count of making a false statement on a loan form, and settle for twenty million in damages."

"The government bought that?"

"Would you?"

"No."

"Neither did they. If he's offering twenty, he's got forty. The only way he could have gotten it is by stealing it. They take him to court. He's convicted. He gets his standard three-year sentence and is ordered to repay fifty million dollars. He says he's broke. They say, 'No way is this man broke.' They lock him up and look for hidden accounts, fake names, the rest of it. They find nothing. He serves his three years. Some time during those three years the statute of limitations runs out on everything he did at the bank."

"You mean he's free? Nobody can do anything?"

"He can never be charged again by the government for the crimes he committed in getting the money. Of course he still can't show that he's got twenty or forty or a hundred million. He's still got the judgment against him for that much, and swearing he didn't have it was a new crime. But generally speaking, his legal problems are over. Now he's got illegal problems."

"What are those?"

"Well, let's study this guy. He got only a three-year sentence for the following reasons." She ticked them off on her long, thin fingers, the nails looking like knife points. "He has never committed any offense before. He is clearly not armed or violent or dangerous. He has no known connection with organized crime or the drug trade. Everybody who ever heard his name thinks he's got a fortune, but federal investigators who sniff out money for a living didn't find it. What does all that mean to you?"

"It means he's got the money pretty well hidden."

"Good for you. You win a trip to the Caribbean." Jane looked closely at Mary Perkins. "I think I know what his illegal problems are."

"Yes," said Mary Perkins. "He's not violent enough to scare anybody off and he's got no connections that are worth anything. If you steal his umpteen million he can't even call the police because he'd have to tell them he had that kind of money, and this time his sentence wouldn't be three years; it'd be more like thirty. He's the perfect victim." After a long pause Mary Perkins added, "He's a lot like me."

6

Jane drove along the dark highway skillfully, sometimes lingering in the wake of a big eighteen-wheel truck for many minutes if the driver was pushing to make time, and sometimes moving out into the other lanes to slither between drifting cars where the truck wasn't nimble enough to navigate. Always she stayed within a few miles an hour of the rest of the traffic to keep from tempting the state police, but almost always she was the one who was passing. It was difficult to study and recognize the headlights coming up from behind, so she kept them back there. Now and then she would see one of the exceptions coming up fast in the rearview mirror, and she would evacuate the lane he seemed to prefer and find a space in the center, where she could move to either side if he swerved toward her, and waited there until he had gone on his way.

"Why aren't you saying anything?" asked Mary Perkins.

"I'm waiting to hear your story."

"I told you."

"You told me a lot of stuff about how you used to steal money. You didn't tell me anything about yourself. I thought you were just warming up to it."

"What do you want to know?"

"What's your name?"

"Mary Perkins," she answered, the annoyance making her voice strain. "I told you that in the ladies' room in Los Angeles."

"Okay," said Jane quietly. She drove in silence for a long time.

"Oh," said Mary Perkins brightly. "You mean the one I was born with. I haven't used it in years, so it sounds strange when I say it: Lily Smith."

"What made you pick Mary Perkins?"

"Well, I was in a business where it didn't seem to be a good idea to use the name on my birth certificate. Smith is okay, but it sounds like an alias. Perkins is the kind of name that makes the mark think good thoughts. Mary Perkins is Mary Poppins, with 'perk,' which is peppy and cheerful instead of 'pop,' which is unpredictable. And 'kins' is sweet and innocent, like babykins and lambkins. Also, all names that end with 'kins' are Anglo-Saxon in a homespun straight-from-the-farm sort of way, not in the my-ancestors-were-on-the-Mayflower way."

"And Mary is just from Mary Poppins?"

She smiled. "It's kind of hard to find anything that sounds more innocent."

"The word immaculate comes to mind," said Jane.

"Well, there's that side of it, of course," said Mary Perkins. "But there are other things that aren't quite as obvious. First, Mary says 'mother.' In fact, it says 'mother of somebody important.' And it's common and feminine. See, if you're going to rob banks - " She stopped, as though she realized it was going to be hard to make herself understood, then started over. "Did you ever take a look at the way your bank is set up?"

"I think I have," said Jane.

"You've got the open floor, which is just there to make you think the bank is big and solid. Then you see the people. At the tellers' counter there are twenty women and a couple of men too young to shave. Then there are a few desks behind that, where everybody is always on the phone. Those are usually women in their fifties. They look like chaperones, there to supervise the twenty women and two boys up front, and to smooth over mistakes."

"I take it those aren't the people you were trying to impress."

"Not if what you came for is money. When you get behind those desks, there are offices. Sometimes they're not even on the same floor. But somewhere down a long, quiet, carpeted hallway there will be a huge wooden desk with nothing on it except a couple of those old-fashioned black pens that stick up out of a marble slab, and a lamp with a green shade. Behind that desk will be a middle-aged man. See, banks are in layers. You can meet fifty-two senior executive vice presidents, and all of them are women. You've got to resist the temptation to tell them enough so that they can say no, and hold out until you see this man."

"And Mary was for him?"

"Yes. It's straightforward, short, and unpretentious. It's not a nickname. It's not a boy's name that was supposed to be cute on a girl. A lot of women in businesses use initials: M. H. Perkins, or M. Hall Perkins. They think it makes them serious. They're wrong. It does not endear them to that man in the back office, and that is the only game being played."

"It is?"

"You must impress the man who has the power to say yes. He doesn't want to be fooled, or to be in business with any person of either sex who is insecure enough to hide things. The only thing worse is a hyphenated name - the woman is married, which is a fact that has very big pluses and minuses that have to be managed carefully. But the hyphenation implies some kind of nonconformist convictions about men and women that she wants to advertise. The man in the back office is not interested in thinking about that. He's interested in getting more money. He wants to deal with somebody who is going to get lots of money and pay him some of it."

"Okay, so Mary Perkins makes it in the door, and M. H. Perkins doesn't."

"Right. She's at the door now. She's energetic and cheerful and well scrubbed, and she has hair that's a bit on the long side and high heels and subtle makeup, but not so subtle that he can't tell she bothered. She wears good jewelry, but very little of it, and it's small. If Mary is married for this meeting, it's a solitaire diamond that's just a little bigger than an honest banker can afford, and that's all. If she's not, maybe a lapel pin. Why? Because that's the way the women who end up with the most money look. The most common way to get it is still to marry it, so Mary is feminine."

"It doesn't sound as though he's thinking about Mary Perkins as a business partner."

"I'm not talking about the deal. I'm talking about the first impression - unconscious, probably - the five seconds from the door to the chair. Finance is a tough business. The guy is smart, and above all he's patient. He's seen a lot on the way to the corner office. In order to automatically get back ten percent of his loan each year, he has to lend the money to somebody who will win - who will use his money to make fifteen percent. What I'm describing for you is the sort of woman he can be made to believe will win."

"How did Mary Perkins get to the point where people are hunting for her?"

Mary Perkins shook her head as though she were marveling at it. "There was a lot of wild stuff in the papers when I went to trial. My lawyer told me that if I went for the plea bargain, it didn't matter how much I agreed to admit I took, because I was already broke. The prosecutor could use a ridiculous number to help her look good, and I would declare bankruptcy and never have to pay a dime. It didn't work that way. Now people think I was one of the ones who ended up with the big money. They want it. I don't have it."

"Who are these people?"

"That's part of the problem. It could be anybody."

Jane looked at her for a moment. Mary was slouching in the passenger seat, looking out the window at the darkness. When she turned to meet Jane's gaze her eyes were wide with wonder and a touch of injury. What she was saying coincided with the truth in one spot: there was no way of limiting the number of people who might be interested in robbing a woman who had stolen millions of dollars. But this did not alter the fact that Mary Perkins knew who was after her tonight, and that she insisted she didn't. Jane said, "Why were you in county jail?"

Mary Perkins shrugged. "Parole violation. I saw those men and tried to leave town."

Jane stifled the annoyed response that rose to her tongue. Mary obviously was experienced enough to know that the best lies were short and simple. Where did the lie begin? She might have noticed that men were following her, but she had not tried to leave town because of that.

Something else must have happened first - something that told her what they wanted. All of the hours Jane had spent hustling this woman around the country settled on her chest like a weight. "Where do you think you could go where there would be the smallest chance you'd be recognized?"

"Smallest chance?"

"That's what I said."

"Let's see. We just left California, so that's out. Texas is also out."

Jane concentrated on the mechanical details for the next few minutes. At Ann Arbor she took the Huron Street exit. She said, "When was the last time you slept?"

"I slept maybe four hours last night. Jails never seem to quiet down until you start to smell breakfast."

"We'll sleep now."

There was a motel just after the exit. Jane pulled into the lot and walked into the office by herself to rent a room. She opened the door with the key, locked the door, checked each of the windows, tossed the key on the table by the door, undressed, and lay down on the nearest bed without speaking. Mary Perkins had no choice but to imitate her. When she awoke, the sun was glaring through a crack between the curtains and Jane was sitting on the other bed reading a newspaper. Mary sat up and said, "What time is it?"

"Ten. Checkout is twelve. We've got a lot to do."

Mary Perkins rubbed her eyes. "I guess we'll make it." She smiled. "It's not as though we had to pack, is it?"

"No."

Mary Perkins swung her feet to the floor and stood up. She had been surprised to see that Jane was dressed, but the newspaper suddenly caught her attention. "You've been out."

"Yes," said Jane, not looking up. Mary Perkins could see that she had circled some little boxes in the want ads. Jane also had set a medium-sized grocery bag on the table beside the key.

"I never heard you," said Mary on the way to the bathroom. "You must be the quietest person I ever met in my life."

"I figured you needed to sleep."

Mary examined the shower and found that the knobs were hot and the tub was wet. She thought about the woman in the other room. A lot of people could tiptoe around pretty well, just like little cats. But how did this one get everything else to be quiet - appliances and fixtures and things?

Mary Perkins got the water to run warm and stepped under the spray. She felt good, she had to admit. Here she was in a clean room with a clear head a couple of thousand miles away from danger, and taking a shower. Once again whatever it was that had always kept the luck coming had not failed.

But now that she was alert and not particularly frightened, she had time to think about that woman out there on the bed. What she sensed about Jane Whitefield was not comforting. No, the animal wasn't a cat. Just because it looked like it had soft fur and the eyes were big and liquid and it didn't make any noise at all didn't mean it was cuddly and gentle. Mary was not the sort of person who lost fingers at zoos. Whatever this one was, it had that look because it happened to be the female of its species, not because it was something you wanted around the house.

The person who had recognized Jane Whitefield in jail was a short black woman named Ellery Robinson. The word on Ellery Robinson was that she had been pulled in on a parole violation. That didn't make her seem interesting until Mary learned that the conviction was for having killed a man in bed with an old-fashioned straight razor. She had served six or seven years of a life sentence in the California Institution for Women at Frontera, one of those places in the endless desert east of Los Angeles. She was in her fifties now, small and compact with a short, athletic body like a leathery teenager. She never spoke to anyone, having long ago lost interest in whatever other people gained from listening, and having gotten used to whatever it was they expelled by talking. But sometimes she still answered questions if they weren't personal.

Mary was in the mess hall one morning when another woman pointed out Jane Whitefield and asked Ellery Robinson if she knew anything about her. Ellery Robinson had actually turned her whole body around in the chow line to stare at her before she said, "She makes people disappear." Then the conversation was over. Ellery Robinson turned back to eye the food on the warming tables. When a young woman down the line on her first day inside saw the same food and started crying, she looked at her too for a second, not revealing either sympathy or contempt, but as though she just wanted to see where the noise was coming from.

Mary Perkins had come upon Ellery Robinson sitting in the sunshine in the yard, a headband around her forehead and the sleeves of her prison shirt rolled up to make it fit her child-sized frame. Mary Perkins smiled, but Ellery Robinson said only, "What do you want?"

"I heard you know who that woman is that came in yesterday. Tall, black hair, thin?"

"Yes."

"Is it true that she hides people?"

Ellery Robinson closed one eye and tilted her head up to look at Mary Perkins. "Why aren't you talking to her?"

"I thought I'd better rind out what I could first."

Ellery Robinson abruptly lost interest in Mary Perkins. She seemed determined to end the conversation, so everything came out quickly in a monotone. "I heard that if a person is in trouble - not the kind of trouble where the cops take them to court, but the kind where the cops find their head in a Dumpster - the person could do worse than see her."

Mary Perkins stared at Ellery Robinson, but her face revealed nothing. "You sure nobody made her up?"

Ellery Robinson nodded in the direction of the cell-block. "There she is."

"If you know her, why haven't you talked to her?"

For the first time Ellery Robinson's facial muscles moved a little, but it wasn't a smile. "I don't have that kind of trouble. If you do, go meet her yourself."

Mary Perkins looked uncomfortable. "This is all new to me. It's the first time I've been arrested."

"No, it isn't." It wasn't an accusation. There was no trace of reproof or irony. There was nothing behind it at all. Then she seemed to acknowledge that her words were what had made Mary Perkins take a step backward. "Lots of bad girls in here. You aren't the worst." She closed her eyes and moved to the side a little so she would be in the full sun again and Mary's shadow would be gone.

Now Mary stood in the shower in Michigan, feeling safe. She had begun to relax when she sensed something had changed again. She tensed and swung around to see the shape outside the shower curtain.

"Dry off," said Jane, "but leave your hair wet."

Mary turned off the water, snatched a towel off the rack, pulled it inside the curtain with her, and turned away to dry herself. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why leave my hair wet?"

Jane reached into the paper bag and pulled out a box with a picture of a fashion model on it. "We'll dry it after it's dyed."

"Dyed? What if I don't want it dyed?"

"Then don't dye it," said Jane. "You've got easy ways to stay lost, and hard ways. Changing the color of your hair is one of the easy ways."

Mary glared at the model on the box. Whatever color her hair had been when the picture was taken, an artist had painted it over a hedgehog brown. "That color?"

Jane set the box on the sink just under the mirror. "What's wrong with it?"

"I've just always been blond."

Jane's eyes lifted to glance at her in the mirror, and then Mary saw them move to the picture on the box. She said nothing, but Mary saw what she was comparing the color on the box to. She angrily snatched another towel off the rack, wrapped it around her and tucked it under her arm like a sarong. "I meant I've always felt blond. I've been blond for a long time."

Jane didn't turn to face her. "We've got less than two hours before checkout time. If you want to look different, the time to do it is before you rent an apartment, not later, after everybody has seen you already. I'll be out there. Think it over."

Mary sat on the edge of the tub and stared at the mirror. It was just high enough so that all she could see of herself was the glowing blond hair at the crown of her head. It was bright, shiny, almost metallic when it was wet like this. She walked to the door and called, "Okay, let's get it over with."

Jane came back in, slipped on rubber gloves, pulled a chair up next to the sink, and went to work on Mary's hair. The acrid smells and the mess on the counter were all familiar to Mary, but it had been years since she had endured them outside of a hairdresser's shop.

Jane worked in silence and with extreme care, glancing at her watch every few minutes. Then it was over, and she was brushing Mary's hair out.

Mary said, "You've done this quite a bit, haven't you?"

"Sure," Jane said. "If you do all of the easy things, the hard ones work better. Dyeing your hair, buying new clothes, using glasses to change the way your eyes look - those are easy. You can do all of them in a day, and none of them has any risk. If you think about what you're trying to accomplish, you can do it as well as I can."

"What am I trying to accomplish?"

Jane looked at her in the mirror impatiently. "You put in a lot of time trying to be Mary Perkins. You had it all worked out. Just do it in reverse. For the time being, you have nothing in common with Mary Perkins. She liked Las Vegas. You hate it; the lights give you a headache and everybody on the street looks like a zombie to you. Mary Perkins made businessmen think about her and remember her. Lose everything you did to accomplish that. Be the one who doesn't catch their eye. That's easy to do, and if you don't do at least that much, you're finished. Anybody who wants to find you can knock on doors and show your picture."

Mary Perkins studied her reflection. The effect wasn't as bad as she had expected. The woman who stared back at her wasn't dowdy or mousy. She was mildly, quietly attractive, and with a little makeup she could be made better than that. What she looked most like was a woman who had never existed; she looked like a grown-up version of Lily Smith. "All right," she said. "What do we change next?"

"That will have to do for now. Come on."

Checking out consisted of sitting in the car while Jane went into the motel office and set the key on the counter. When she returned, she started the car and said, "All right. Now we start getting into the hard parts. Do you have identification in any name besides Mary Perkins?"

"Lila Samuels," said Mary.

"Throw her away with Mary Perkins. You've been in county jail. Although you haven't exactly said so, you've been investigated, and probably arrested more than once. The authorities know your aliases, and so can anybody else who wants to."

Mary Perkins said, "I've got to be somebody."

"I've got some papers with me that you can use. Your name is Donna Kester. You're thirty-five."

Mary Perkins stared at her. "You have fake I.D. with you? But you were arrested too. They went through your purse."

Jane pulled the car out of the parking lot and drove up the street. "It wasn't in my purse." Jane had brought the papers for Mona and kept them taped under the dashboard of each car they had used while traveling across the country. After Dennis had wrecked the last car, she had gone to the lot where it had been towed and found the papers untouched. "You can be Donna Kester without worrying about anything for a while."

They looked at three different apartments before they found the right one. It was in a building in the middle of a large modern apartment complex on Huron Street that seemed to contain a high proportion of single people, but it was far enough from the University of Michigan campus to be vacant. The fact that Donna Kester had a credit card was enough to get her a lease that began in two days. The fact that she had no local employer only confirmed her story that she had just gotten to town.

That afternoon Jane checked them into another motel at the edge of Ann Arbor, past the place where Huron Street crossed Route 94 and became Liberty Road. Jane sat in the motel room on the twin bed across from Mary. It was dusk, and the cold wind was beginning to blow outside to announce that the short fall days were fading into winter nights here. The tree branches that scraped and rattled the gutters of the building were bare, and the wet pavement of the parking lot outside the window would be frosted by morning.

Jane said, "This is a good place to be. There are about thirty-five thousand students here, just about all of them strangers. Figure five thousand faculty, all from other places. Most of them are married, so they're really ten thousand, and another five thousand staff. Most of those people just returned here for fall semester. You're one of fifty thousand people who just got to town in a community with a year-round population that can't be much over a hundred thousand."

"Are you trying to sell me a condo?" asked Mary.

"No," said Jane. "I'm trying to teach you something. If you're going to be a fugitive you'd better get good at it. I've heard a couple of versions of who isn't chasing you, but not who is. It doesn't matter. This isn't the sort of place where they'll look first. That's the best you can do in choosing a place to be invisible. There are always about five likely places to look for anybody. If you're stupid, you'll be in one. Once you move beyond those, every place is about as likely as any other, so the odds of finding you drop dramatically."

"Where would you look? You said five places."

"J haven't studied Mary Perkins as thoroughly as they have. You've been to Las Vegas and liked it. You'd be too smart to go back, and Reno's too close, so I might try looking in Atlantic City. You said you had worked in Texas and California, so people know you. But that leaves lots of cities in between that would appeal to Mary Perkins: I'd try Scottsdale, Sedona, Santa Fe. You like to be around money and sunshine." As she watched Mary, she could see that the list was making her frightened. "The fifth place is somewhere in the South."

Mary Perkins looked like a woman who had paid to have her palm read and heard that she had no life line. "Where?"

"You have just a trace of a southern accent. Since I know you've been arrested, I'd check the arrest record to find the city where you were born. That's always the fifth place."

Mary looked at Jane with an expression that was meant to be intrigued puzzlement, but the surface never set properly; her face only formed itself into pie-faced hurt. "Why is that?"

Jane's eyes were tired and sad. "I don't know. Some people will tell you it's because they know the territory better than a stranger could, but they say that even if every inch of the place was bulldozed and rebuilt the day they left. Some of them say it's because they can get help from friends and relatives, but half the time they don't ask for it when they're there. They go there even if everybody they ever knew is dead and buried."

"You're telling me what you don't believe. What do you believe makes them go back?"

"I'm telling you I don't think the people who do it know why. Maybe it's just some feeling that people have because we're animals too. You go to ground where you once felt most safe, and that's wherever your mother was." She watched Mary Perkins for a moment. "It's a lousy instinct, and it will get you killed."

"So what now?"

"This is a place where nobody is searching for you. You look a little different, and if you work at it you can change more. You have identification as Donna Kester that should hold up. The credit cards are real. You'll get the bills. The driver's license is from New York, but it's good too. Somebody actually took the road test. You can get a new one here with the old one and the birth certificate. That's real too." A man Jane knew had found a job in a small-town courthouse and added forty or fifty birth records that hadn't been there before. He sold about one name a year, so the odds were good that nobody would catch one and start looking into the rest.

Mary Perkins looked increasingly alarmed. "How long do we have to stay here?"

"It's up to you. If you want my advice, I'll give it to you. Spend your time around the university, where there are crowds of strangers of every description and all the thugs wear helmets and shoulder pads. Buy yourself a long, warm coat with a high collar and wear a hat and scarf."

"You're telling me you're cutting me loose, aren't you?" said Mary Perkins with growing anxiety. "I thought you were going to protect me and get me settled."

Jane framed her words carefully, making an effort to keep the frustration out of her voice. "You came to me in trouble, with two men on your back. I got you out of that trouble because you asked me to and I didn't think you could do it yourself. Now you're reasonably safe if you want to be. That's as far as I go with you."

"It's because you think I can't pay, right? Well, I can. I've got money with me, and I can get more when it's safe to travel. Enough to make it worth your time, anyway."

"Keep it," said Jane. She picked up her purse and the keys to the car. "The more you have, the longer it will be before you do something foolish." She walked to the door, stopped, and added, "Take care."

"I have a right to know why."

"No, you don't," said Jane. She stepped outside, closed the door, and walked across the cold lot to the car. She started it and drove around the block and past the motel twice. When she was certain that nobody was watching the motel and nobody had followed the car, she continued straight to Route 94 and headed east toward the junction with 23 to Ohio.