Dance for the Dead

16

Ellery Robinson opened the apartment door and looked out past her with wary eyes. "Come in," she said quietly. "This isn't a neighborhood for standing in a lighted doorway."

Jane stepped inside and watched the thin, hard arms move to close the steel door and then turn the dead bolt.

"I been waiting for you," said Ellery Robinson. "I knew you saw me in jail because I saw you. How did you find me? I'm not in the phone book."

"I went to your old apartment and asked around until I found somebody who still knew you.... You're in trouble again."

"No big thing. My parole officer thinks I have an attitude, so he forgot to write down when I came to see him."

"You don't have an attitude?"

Ellery Robinson shrugged her thin shoulders. "When a black woman gets past the age where they stop thinking about her big ass, they remember they didn't like her very much to begin with."

"Can you do anything about it?"

"He turned out to be unreliable, so his reports aren't enough to send anybody to jail anymore."

"He must have been really unreliable."

"Yeah. While I was in jail I heard they caught him in his office with a Mexican girl going down on him. He's been getting what he wanted regular like that for years. All he had to do to get them deported was check a box on a form, so they did a lot of favors."

"Does he know who set him up?"

For the first time Ellery Robinson smiled a little, and Jane could see a resemblance to the young woman she had met years ago. "Could be anybody. Everybody knew."

Jane sat in silence and stared at her. She had aged in the past eleven years, but it seemed to have refined and polished her. Ellery Robinson tolerated the gaze for a time, then said, "How about you? Have you been well?"

"I can't complain."

"You mean you can't complain to me, don't you?" said Ellery Robinson. "You're thinking I should have gone with you."

"I don't know. Nobody can say what would have happened."

"Don't feel sorry for me. I had a life, you know. My sister Clarice and I had one life. When I was in prison I would sit in the sun in the yard and close my eyes and follow her and the baby around all day with my mind. The women in jail thought I'd gone crazy, that I sat there all day in a coma, but I wasn't there at all. I was living inside my head."

"You don't regret it?"

"I regret that I'm a murderer. I don't regret that he got killed. He needed it."

Jane nodded. "You doing okay now?"

"I'm contented. I know what's on your mind. It's that woman in county jail, isn't it?"

"Mary Perkins?" said Jane. "No. She's far away now."

"What, then?"

"I know people hear things - in jail, the parole office, places like that."

"Sometimes."

"What have you heard about Intercontinental Security?"

Ellery Robinson's clear, untroubled face wrinkled with distaste. "If you're hiring, hire somebody else. If they're looking for you, don't let them find you."

"They seem to have a lot of business."

"Oh, yeah, it's a big company. And it's old, like Pinkerton's or Brinks or one of them. I think they used to guard trains and banks and things. For all I know they still do; I'm not a stockholder."

"Have you heard anything about burglaries in places they're supposed to protect - as though they might be fooling their own alarm systems or something?"

"No. What I hear most about them now is they hunt for people."

"What sort of people?"

"The usual. Skip-trace, open warrants, wanted for questioning, runaways. Somebody jumps bail, the bail bondsman is on the hook. Some clerk takes a little money out of the till and runs. The police don't look very hard, so the company hires Intercontinental."

"What's different?"

"The ones they bring in seem to fall down a lot. Maybe a broken arm, maybe a leg. Maybe their face doesn't look too good."

"It's an old company. Did they always have that reputation?"

Ellery Robinson shrugged. "I didn't always know people who got chased. Then I was away for a few years. It's since I got back that I've been hearing things."

"Who have you been hearing them from? Can you help me get to one of them?"

The little woman leaned back on her worn couch and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. She seemed to be searching for names and addresses up there, but Jane could tell that she was rejecting some of them for reasons that she would not reveal.

The young man stood beside a car in the darkness. He was tall and heavy, with a jacket that was too thick for this weather and baggy blue pants. Jane could see that there was a streetlight directly above him, but the lamp was a jagged rim of broken glass.

Ellery Robinson followed the angle of Jane's eyes. "The street dealers shoot them out at night, and the city replaces them in the day. Everybody gets paid." She stopped walking and held Jane's arm. The young man looked up the block for three or four seconds, then down the block. When he was satisfied, he came away from the car and walked across the sidewalk onto the lawn.

Ellery Robinson looked up and said to him, "This is the woman." Then she turned to Jane. "He won't hurt you." Then she turned and walked away across the packed dirt of the big gray project toward her room.

Jane turned to the young man. "Thank you for coming."

The young man started walking, and she stepped off with him. "Got to keep moving or everybody starts to notice you're not going about your business."

"All right."

"She said you want to know about Intercontinental."

"Yes," said Jane. She waited for the logical question, but it did not come. He didn't consider it his business why she wanted to know, just as Ellery Robinson had not taken it on herself to tell either of them the other's name.

He said, "I worked for them."

"How long?"

"About two weeks." He anticipated the next question. "In October. They put out ads in this part of town. They wanted store security for two big malls in time for Christmas. You know, they didn't want a couple of white kids in uniforms in front of a store on Crenshaw. They'd just get hurt."

"What happened?"

"They made me a trainee. That means they don't have to pay regular wages. They put me through a lie detector test, a couple of days in a classroom, and turned me out. I worked the malls for a week and a half."

"Why did they fire you?"

The young man's eyes shot to hers and then ahead again. "Security check turned up my priors. Couldn't get bonded."

"What did you find out before you left?"

"Now you're not going to believe me, right?" he asked. "I got priors, and I'm a 'disgruntled former employee.'"

Jane looked up at the sky, then sighted along the wall of the complex. "It's a cold, clammy night for L.A. It'll probably rain soon, from the way it feels. And you may not believe it, but I hardly ever find myself in this part of town after midnight in any weather."

"I can believe that," he said.

"If I thought you were going to lie to me, I'd be pretty stupid to be here, wouldn't I?"

"Yeah."

"Then tell me what it was like."

"They're looking for young men with strong motivation and they'll give them the skills to succeed. Like the army. They got this guy who comes in and tells you how to be a thief in a big store so that you know what to look for."

"Did he get it right?"

"There were plenty of people in that room who could tell you for sure, but I wasn't one of them. I think it was pretty close, though, because they were all listening. Probably got some new ideas for the off-season."

"The skills to succeed. Can you tell me anything about this guy? Who was he?"

"His name was Farrell. Sort of an old guy with gray hair that's all bristly like a brush and spit-shined shoes. They called him the training officer. After he told us how to spot thieves, he told us what to do about them."

"Take them to the back of the store and call your supervisor?"

"Yeah," he said. "He says the system doesn't do any good. They get a court date and in a day they're back for more. So the supervisor would take them someplace and scare them."

"How scared?"

"Farrell says that comes under initiative. The company judges supervisors on the results."

"What are the results?"

"He says there are three kinds: the ones who don't need it and are doing it for some kind of kick, the ones in a crew that sells it, and junkies. There's no way to make any of them stop, but you can make them go to another store next time."'

"Did you get to see any of this?"

"Once. A woman got caught with a bag that had a big box in it with a trapdoor cut in it, and she was shoveling stuff into it. The supervisor took her in the back for a while, then shoved her out the loading dock door. She ran."

"I've heard this before. Stores do it themselves. What else did you see?"

"The next week my background check comes in, so I'm out. I turn in my blues and go home. Two days later I get a phone call. It's Farrell. He says he's sorry to hear what happened, but maybe he can do something for me. I got initiative and motivation and I'm not afraid to do what needs to be done. He says sometimes there are jobs for people who cant make it through a background check. I'd still be working for Intercontinental, but they'd pay me in cash. Kind of an undercover job, and it paid a lot more."

"Did he say what you would be doing?"

"I'm twenty-two. Never had a job before because I'm dragging a five-page rap sheet. Got two convictions. Aggravated assault - did three for that in youth camp. Assault with a deadly weapon - did three more for that in Soledad. I figure he was looking for a brain surgeon."

"You said there were a lot of people in the training class who had the same problem. Did anybody else get the same offer?"

"I don't know."

"What did you tell him?"

They reached the sidewalk on the other side of the complex. He moved to the outside and looked carefully up and down the street before he ventured out of the shelter of the big buildings. "I told you I couldn't get another job."

"So you signed on."

"He had me come to another office. Not the big place where they hire and train people. This one was out in Van Nuys. There were eight or ten men hanging around - white guys, black guys, a couple of Mexicans. Everybody dressed good, but not really doing much. The sign on the door said 'Enterprise Development.'"

Jane remembered the men at the courthouse. They had all been wearing suits or sportcoats, and none of them had been carrying anything that could connect them with Intercontinental Security. "Where in Van Nuys?"

"The address is 5122 Van Nuys Boulevard. Big building, small office."

"What did you do there?"

"Farrell came and talked to me for a while."

"What did he tell you?"

"Pretty much what anybody tells you when you're doing something you get paid in cash for. If something goes wrong they'll slip you bail money, but if you tell anybody anything, there are a bunch of them and only one of you."

"And he still didn't tell you what he wanted you for?"

"Yeah, he did," said the young man. "Hunting."

"What?"

"That's what he said. The way it works is, the company has a list of people they want. The company does whatever is legal to find them. That's all in the open. It's a big company with offices in fifty places and a lot of people on the payroll. But then there's some cases that are off the books. Like maybe a guy disappears at the same time as a computer chip or a famous painting or something. The company knows it, they know he's got it, or he's got the money from it. Somehow he got away with it."

"So they hunt him."

"Yeah. The rest of it was just about the head guy."

"What about him?"

"How he did all of it. He went to work in the L.A. office a few years ago and set all this up. He was born off in the woods someplace way north of here, and he's a tracker. He thinks like a hound. Once he's got the scent, he never gives up. Farrell says he used to go after killers all by himself just for the kick it gave him. He gets a rush out of it, like a hunter."

"When?"

"When what?"

"When did he go after killers?"

"Before. When he was a cop."

Jane felt increasingly tense. "What's his name?"

"Bearclaw."

It wasn't exactly a surprise, but she felt a sensation like an electric shock. "Barraclough?"

"B-A-R-R-A-something. He's - "

"I've heard of him," Jane interrupted. She tried to clear her mind of the thoughts that were crowding in. She could almost see Danny Mittgang's face eight or nine years ago when she had asked him why he was running. He had not said the Los Angeles police wanted him as a material witness; what came out of Danny's mouth was "Barraclough." He had actually begun to sweat and gulp air. The name was already so familiar in certain circles that he had expected her to know it.

She had heard it many times after that, and each time there was something odd about the story. A fugitive's friends who had refused to betray him the first time they were questioned talked to Barraclough. A middle-aged man who had committed a white-collar crime would uncharacteristically forget there was no evidence against him and burst out at Barraclough with guns blazing. Barraclough would use information that could have come only from a wiretap to find a suspect, but no wiretap evidence would be introduced at the trial. She had filed the name with a few others, policemen in various parts of the country who were willing to do just about anything to catch a suspect. But the difference between Barraclough and the others was that when his name was mentioned, the person who said it was always afraid.

Jane tried to concentrate. She was not likely to get a second interview with this young man. "How did you get out of the job?"

"No problem. I told Farrell I didn't want in."

"Why not?"

"I didn't like him."

"It was the job you didn't like, wasn't it? The first one he wanted you to do?"

The young man shrugged. "Ellery said you might be interested in the picture they gave me, and I just told you I got no job."

Jane held out her hand. In the palm were two fresh green bills that had been rolled into her fingers since she'd come out of the shadows to meet him. They unrolled enough so that he could see the hundreds in the corners.

He reached inside his jacket and pulled a photograph out of his breast pocket. He handed it to her and then gently plucked the two bills off her palm.

Jane held the picture up, trying to catch the dim glow of the distant street lamp. She didn't want to wait to know whether it was one of the Christmas snapshots the Deckers had mailed to Grandma or one of the family mementos the killers had taken from the Washington house. She caught a flash of blond hair, and held it higher to be sure. It wasn't a picture of Timmy at all: it was Mary Perkins.

17

Mary Perkins had spent most of her month in Ann Arbor learning about Donna Kester. She had discovered that Donna was not comfortable in the apartment that Jane Whitefield had helped her to rent. It was not Jane Whitefield's fault, although she was tempted to sweep up whatever annoying particles of blame were lying around and heap them on her. Mary had assumed that Donna Kester was going to be someone who would like the long, clean lines of the modern apartment complex. It reminded Mary of the hotels where she had stayed for most of her adult life.

But as the winter came on, the building seemed hastily built and drafty, as though the carpenters had left something undone that she couldn't see. The exercise room that the tenants shared was a big box with a glass wall where women a lot younger than Mary went to display the results of many earlier visits to young men who seemed to be too intent on lifting large pieces of iron to notice what was being offered. The pool in the courtyard promised more of the same in the distant summer without the chance to hide the mileage under a good pair of tights. And the dirty snow that had drifted over its plastic cover began to contribute to her feeling that summer wasn't something that was still to come.

As Donna Kester explained her position to herself, the place wasn't congenial. She moved closer to the university and rented the top floor of a big house that had been built in the 1920s. It was the sort of house where she had grown up in Memphis, with a lot of time-darkened wood in places where they didn't put wood anymore, and a layer of thick carpet that covered the stairway and muffled the creak and was much cleaner at the edges than at the center.

Her apartment had a small, neat little kitchen and a bedroom with a brass bed in it that wasn't a reproduction of anything, but wasn't good enough to be an antique. The closet was small, but it was big enough for the sort of wardrobe that Donna Kester was likely to acquire. The living room had a bad couch and a good easy chair that was aimed as though by a surveyor directly at a twenty-year-old RCA television set that picked up only two channels she had trouble telling apart. But the two channels had forecasters who did a fair job of predicting the weather, and this was about all she required of them for the moment because it let her know what to wear while she was out looking for a job.

Mary began to feel more comfortable as Donna Kester soon after she moved into the old apartment. She had no trouble suppressing the landlords' curiosity with a vague reference to a divorce. In the future, whenever they had a question in their minds about her lack of a work history and shallow credit record, she could be too sensitive to talk about it. They could chew on the divorce and come up with plausible answers until they found one that satisfied them. It sometimes seemed that Donna Kester knew everything about people that Mary Perkins knew, only it hadn't cost her as much.

Donna walked into the hallway, threaded her new scarf into the sleeve of her big goose-down coat, stuffed her new gloves into the pockets, and hoisted the coat onto the peg. She sat down on the steps to take off her boots, and felt the distressing sensation of having the melted snow from her last trip soak through the seat of her pants. She stood up quickly, set the boots on the mat, and carefully made her way up the stairs in her socks. She felt unfairly punished. She thought she had learned about tracking snow on the steps early enough. The carpet would have dried by now if there had been heating ducts near the entrance at the foot of the stairs.

If she owned this place, she would damned well have a contractor in by tomorrow noon. She would put a big old brass register right by the door where a person could get hugged by that breath of hot air as soon as she made it inside, and then leave her coat and boots in front of it to get toasted before she went out again. She had a brief fantasy about buying the house from the Monahans and getting the contractor on the phone before the ink on the deed was dry.

She reached into her purse and grasped her key. That made her feel better. It was the big old-fashioned kind that was a shaft of steel four inches long with an oval ring on one end and the teeth on the other. It looked like the key to a castle and it made her feel safe. She had some justification for the feeling. The lock set into the thick, solid door looked about the size of a deck of cards, with big steel tumblers and springs that snapped like a trap when she locked it, and it was easy to see that it had been in there for a long time. If there had ever been a break-in they would have replaced it.

She reached the top, put her hand on the yellowed porcelain doorknob, pushed in her key, and felt the door swing open. The lights were on. She turned and tried to step back down the stairs as quickly and quietly as she could, but she knew she was making too much noise - already had made too much noise just coming in and climbing the stairs - so she began to take the steps by leaning on the railing and jumping as many as she could to land with a thump.

She burned with a hatred for her stupidity. When she had felt the cold wet spot on the stairs she should have known someone else had been here. It wasn't as though it were a faint clue; it was a warning sign practically branded on her ass. She regretted all of it: leaving the sprawling, noisy, busy apartment complex for this old house where they didn't even have to think hard about how to get her alone because she was always alone; letting herself rent a second apartment at all, because showing the false documents twice raised the risk by exactly one hundred percent; trusting like a child to big locks and keys - no, hiding the way a child did, not by concealing herself but by covering her own eyes with her hands.

As she reached the bottom and realized with a pang that common sense required that she race through the door into the snow without stopping for her boots, the voice touched her gently.

"It's me," said Jane Whitefield. "Don't run. It's only me."

Mary stopped with her face to the door. She turned and looked up. She could see the silhouette of the tall, slim woman in front of the dimly lighted doorway at the top of the stairs. The shape was dark, a deeper shadow, and for a second a little of the fear came back into her chest like a paralysis in her lungs. Then the woman at the top of the stairs swung Mary's door open and said in the same quiet voice, "Sorry to startle you."

Mary climbed back up her stairs slowly and deliberately because she wanted to let her heart stop pounding. The way Jane had said it was an invitation to join a conspiracy. People who were startled jumped half an inch and said, "Oh." They didn't vault down twenty-foot staircases and dash into the snow in wet socks. That was what people did who were terrified, running for their lives. We'll let your cowardice pass without comment, and we'll call it something else. That was what Jane was saying. No, it was even worse than that. She knew it wasn't merely cowardice. It was the only sane response for a woman who was guilty of so much that any surprise visitor was probably there because he wanted to put her in a bag. That was what Jane was passing without comment.

Mary reached the top of the stairs and stepped into her living room. She looked around for Jane but couldn't see or hear her, which made her remember the strangeness about the woman that had always irritated her. It was that erect quietness that made other people feel as though they talked too much without getting anything in return, like they were emptying the contents of their brains into a deep, dark hole, where it wasn't deemed enough to amount to much. She drifted around like she was the queen of the swans, and it was okay with her if anybody with her suspected she thought they were dumb, short, and pasty-faced and their voices were too loud.

Mary heard the sound of the teakettle steaming in the kitchen; then it stopped, so that was where Jane must be. She felt tension stiffen the back of her neck and shoulders.

This was her place, and there was some primal insult in having another woman walk in and go through her cupboards. She hated owing this woman so much that she had to endure it.

Mary moved toward her little kitchen just as Jane came out with the tea tray, already talking. "I'm really sorry I had to come in like this. It would make me angry if anyone did it to me, but it seemed best. In the first place, I didn't know you well enough to be able to predict whether you were likely to have gotten your hands on a gun. You've had plenty of time to do it."

Mary felt the words dissolve what remained of her confidence like a sugar cube in a rainstorm. She had been here a month, and it had never occurred to her to obtain the most obvious way of protecting herself. The decision she would have made was by no means certain, but that didn't help; it made her even more frightened, because she had not given it even enough thought to reject it.

But Jane was going on. and Mary hadn't been listening. "... didn't want to get my head blown off, and I figured if your landlord heard a woman coming up the steps he would assume it was you. I've been very careful not to cause trouble by coming here. Nobody followed me and nobody had a chance to see me outside waiting. I saw you coming up the sidewalk, so I made tea." She held out a cup so Mary could take it.

Mary sniffed it and said, "It's different."

"I picked it up in L.A." said Jane. "It's mixed with blackberry leaves. I've got a weakness for nonsense like that."

Mary sipped. At least this woman had not come in and put her hands into the cupboards looking for things. The teakettle and the water were in plain sight. She resisted the feeling. Whatever this woman wanted, she was not going to get it by dropping a teabag into a cup of water. She smiled. "Me too."

Mary's smile was like a cat purring while it rubbed its fur against a person's leg. Jane could see that the smile had not just been practiced in front of a mirror. It had about it the cat's ease and grace that could only have come from bringing it out and using it to get what the cat needed. She looked around. "I like your apartment," she said.

Mary longed for her to say something insincere about the furniture.

"You got everything right," said Jane. "It would be pretty hard for somebody to get all the way up that stairway if you really wanted to stop him. The building looks like a single-family house from the outside, so nobody would look for a stranger here. That's the important thing. Not what you'll do if they find you, but being where they won't look."

"How did you find me? Or were you here all the time watching me?"

"Why would I do that?"

"I don't know. Maybe to see what I did." Mary realized that she had not said anything. She resolved not to make this mistake again. "To see if I was good enough at it to have a chance."

Jane said, "No, I don't play games."

"Then you changed your mind about me." Without any reason at all, Mary thought.

"No again," said Jane. "I expected you to be good at it."

Mary was tired. She had spent the day trying to get personnel managers to give her a competitive test of business skills when all they wanted was references, then to give her the benefit of the doubt based on her ability to speak knowledgeably, and the promise that references could be obtained, and finally just to give her a break because she was pleasant, well-groomed, and eager. Now she was sitting in a pair of pants with a wet seat. "Let me try to be more direct," she said. "You helped me, and I thank you for that. Then you walked out on me. Rather mysteriously, I might add. Now you're back. You tell me I played a good game of hide-and-seek, but here you are. You seem to have had no trouble finding me, or opening the lock to my door to get in and make yourself a cup of tea. I've never had any difficulty believing you're better at this than I am, but now I'm not just awed, I'm scared to death. So what do you want?"

Jane put down her tea. "You shouldn't be scared to death. I found you because I knew where to look. If you had been stupid, you would have left Ann Arbor, put yourself in the airports and hotel lobbies again, and inevitably found your way to one of the places where they're looking. I knew you weren't stupid, so I was pretty sure you must still be in this town. So what would you be doing? If you had wanted to give up on life you would have stayed put and done nothing. A person can sit in the right locked room forever without getting found if she has enough to pay the rent. I figured you would be too lively to go that way, so I tried the job route."

"What's the job route?" Mary asked.

"I knew you had the sense to figure out that the more you do with a fake identity, the better it gets because after a while it's not exactly fake anymore. You're not the only woman in town with records that only go back a few years. Pretty soon it will take a lot of digging to detect whether you're entirely rebuilt or just went through the usual changes - a couple of marriages that brought new names, a couple of moves from one state to another, a career change or two. Having eliminated the possibility that you had left or gone into a coma, I knew you would be applying for jobs. It's the best way to start a new life."

"That was enough?" asked Mary.

"The biggest and safest employer in Ann Arbor is the university. I called the personnel office and said I was a member of a faculty committee trying to hire someone to do the accounting and clerical work for a big research grant in the medical school."

"Why that? Why not something else?"

"Faculty members aren't hired by the university personnel office. They're hired by the faculty, so there was very little chance she would look for a personnel file on me and not find it. Medical schools are semi-autonomous, so I could play an insider without knowing anything about her operation. I asked her to send me copies of applications with a bookkeeping background, since I figured that would be your strength. I asked how long it would take to bring them to my office. She said a day or two, so I offered to come over and pick them out myself. That way I didn't need an office."

"You got this address off my application. God, it's easy."

"Not that easy," said Jane. "Nobody knows what I knew - your new name, the city, and where you'd have to apply for work if you wanted any." She stared at Mary Perkins over the rim of her teacup. "Not even Barraclough."

Mary felt her spine stiffen. She considered her options. She could pretend the name had made no impression on her, and later find a chance to slip away quietly. She could create some kind of disturbance - throw the cup at Jane and run. But even if she got out the door, the only way of taking the next step was to fall back on the name and the credit that Jane had given her. She wasn't ready. She should have been ready. "How do you know that name? I never told you."

"Why didn't you?" asked Jane. "You told me you didn't know who was looking for you."

Mary Perkins's mind stumbled, held back from the conclusion it was about to reach. That was right. She had come to Jane Whitefield, and Jane Whitefield kept nagging her about who it was. She hadn't known. She couldn't have been working for Barraclough. At least a month ago she couldn't. "I wanted you to help me," said Mary. "I only provide the arguments for what I want. You have to supply your own arguments against."

"All right," said Jane. "Then let's take the whole issue off the table. I have decided to help you."

"In spite of Barraclough?"

"Because of Barraclough."

"Do you know him?"

"I've seen his work." She looked at Mary closely. "Has he ever seen you?"

The question didn't make any sense unless the way Jane Whitefield wanted to make money was to sell someone else to Barraclough and say she was Mary Perkins. "I suppose he has lots of pictures of me."

"Not pictures," Jane said. "Has he actually looked at you face-to-face?"

"Is that important?"

"Yes. Tell me."

"We never met," said Mary Perkins. "When I got out of the federal prison eight months ago, he somehow heard about it. He knew where I was living. How he got that I don't know. They said it was going to be a secret to help in my rehab - you know, help me fit into the community, keep my old cronies away, and all that."

"He used to be a cop. He knows how to use the system. He didn't come for you himself?"

"He sent two men," said Mary Perkins. "They explained to me about Barraclough."

"What did they tell you?"

"He's the director of the Los Angeles office of Intercontinental Security. He's got a huge organization and a lot of power, and connections with every police department. You can't get away from him and you can't fight him. He had read about me."

"Read what?"

"Everything. Newspaper reports, the transcript of my trial, the investigation reports. I don't know how he got those either. He had decided that I had a whole lot of savings and loan money hidden someplace. He wanted it. I couldn't call the police and say he was taking it because I wasn't supposed to have it."

"You told me the pitch. You just didn't tell me where you heard it. Since you're still running and they're still chasing, you must have gotten away. How?"

"They didn't put a gun to my head and say 'Pay or die.' I told them I didn't have it. But they said Barraclough knew I did because he had followed my case." She chuckled sadly. "You know how prosecutors are. They rave around in front of the jury, flinging enormous, impossible numbers around. This is how much is missing from savings and loans in this great, tormented state of Texas. This is the woman caught with ten dollars of it. All that nonsense doesn't simply go into the jury's subconscious; it goes into the transcript. Even if your lawyer proves it's silly, once it's been said it exists. It had convinced Barraclough I had some insane amount of money - like fifty million."

"So Barraclough sent them to pick you up and take you with them, right?"

"What else? If I had that kind of money I couldn't haul it around in a suitcase. It would take a couple of freight cars. It would have to be in a numbered account in Switzerland or someplace. They said they'd have to hold on to me until I had led them to the accounts."

"What was the up side?"

"Does this sound like it has an up side?"

Jane said, "When it was all over, what did they promise to leave you? Would you have any money left, or just your life?"

"They said Barraclough had done this quite a few times before. He just took half from each one he caught and let him go."

"Did you believe them?"

Mary Perkins smirked. "Do I look younger than I am, or what? It was like having a man ask you to take off half your clothes."

"What happened then?"

"They each took one of my arms and led me outside to their car. It was a two-door, so you had to kind of squinch in behind the front seat. They had the passenger seat already tipped forward when they opened the door. They had turned off the dome light so it wouldn't go on when the door opened. I remember looking in and thinking, I'm going to die. I had just read one of those articles they have in magazines about serial killers and rapists, and it said whatever you do, don't get in the car. Once you're in, nothing is up to you anymore; it's up to them. They pushed me in and I started crying."

"Because you thought you were going to die?"

"Knew it. I knew I would die if I didn't do something. The crying was all I could think of. It made them nervous and nasty. One of them said if I didn't stop he'd hurt me, so I stopped. I could see that made them get overconfident. It was a long drive, and they had been waiting outside my apartment for hours. They had to make a pee stop. They were talking about going to a gas station, but they had a full tank, so they didn't want to stop and have the gas guy stare at them and maybe remember they had a woman with them. So they waited until they were on the Interstate and pulled into a truck stop. One of them was going to go in, and then the other while the first one stayed with me. I kept looking for a chance to get in there, so I could scream my head off, even make one of them hit me, but they didn't give me any chance. I tried saying I had to pee too. I tried saying I had to change a tampon. I begged, I promised."

"How did you manage it?"

"Did I mention it was a two-door car?"

"Yes."

"They kept the motor running so they could get away fast if something went wrong. I waited until the first one got back. He was the driver. He comes to the left door to open it, and the other one opens the right-side door to get out. I pushed the driver's seat forward, flopped over on it on my belly, set the transmission in gear, ducked down, and punched the gas pedal with the palm of my hand. The car goes. Not real fast, just jerks ahead and coasts at maybe ten miles an hour. The one trying to get into the driver's side gets his foot run over. The other one jumps back into his seat. The car moves in this sort of stately pace right into the front of the restaurant - crash! When it hit, it kind of jammed me head-first under the dashboard onto my elbows with the brake pedal pressing on my forehead and the steering wheel holding my butt down and not enough room for a somersault anyway. The one in the seat kind of belly-flopped next to me, only his face hit the glove compartment."

Jane frowned. "Why are you making this up?"

Mary Perkins looked angry, but she seemed to be holding her breath. Finally she let it out. "I'm not sure. I guess I wanted to sound brave."

"What really happened?"

"A Highway Patrol car pulled in beside us. I was too scared to even look at them. The cop saw I had been crying, so he knocked on my window and asked if there was something wrong. I told the cop I was turning myself in - that I left Los Angeles in violation of my parole."

"Why did you tell him you were on parole?"

"I thought it was a stroke of genius. If I said I'd been kidnapped, they'd keep me there to testify. They could do it; I really was out on parole. Even if I did get these two convicted, what good was that going to do me? They might not have been telling the truth about Barraclough, but they were working for somebody. On their own, these two couldn't have known all that about my trial transcripts and everything. They were maybe twenty-one or twenty-two years old, and dumb."

"So what happened?"

"I figured the C.H.P. would just ship me back to L.A. for a lecture, and when that was over I could hop on a plane and disappear. Only wouldn't you know it, when they identified these two characters, they both turned out to be convicted felons, so instead of a little scolding, I get to do ninety in L.A. County Jail. Consorting with convicted felons is apparently more serious than going out of town without telling your parole officer."

"That was what you were in for when you saw me?"

"Yes. They let me out two weeks early, or else those guys would have had me before I got to the airport. But they must have a way of knowing when somebody is released early."

"Not them. Barraclough does." They sat for a time in silence, sipping their tea. The cold wind outside the old house was stronger up here on the second floor. The snow was falling harder now, as it sometimes did after nightfall, and the white flakes came tumbling into the light and ticked the window as though it were the windshield of a moving car.

Mary Perkins said, "What do you know about Barraclough?"

Jane stopped watching the snowflakes and turned to her. "He's not what they all think he is. They think he's a hunter, so he's entitled to hunt. That's the chance you take: if you run, there will be somebody like him who gets paid to bring you back. But he's not that anymore. He's a cannibal."

"What do you mean?"

"He's not working for the system anymore, catching people and bringing them in and then getting his reward. He's living by gobbling people up."

"Who else?"

"The last one I know about is an eight-year-old boy."

"Why was he after a little boy?"

"The boy inherited some money and disappeared. Barraclough heard about it and killed at least four people just because they were between him and the boy - killed them just to get them out of his way so he could get the money."

"Did he get it?"

Jane shrugged. "The lawyers still have to do their audits and studies and sort out at least eight years of paper. When they finish, they'll probably learn enough to charge an accountant who's already dead with breach of trust or something. They'll also find out that the money is gone. They don't know that yet, but it is. Barraclough would never have killed the accountant if he didn't already have it."

"Why did you come back here?"

"Because I was one of the people who let him do it. I don't want him to do the same thing to you."

18

The night was cold and the oil furnace hummed in the basement two stories below them. Jane sat quietly in the comer of the room looking out the window and watching the feathery snow falling, first to fill in the icy ruts on the road and then to lay a blue-white blanket over it. No cars passed on the street to disturb it, and nobody had been out to leave human footprints, so it began to seem that she and Mary Perkins were the only ones left, adrift in a place where there was no motion and no time.

Mary stirred and walked into the kitchen. After more snow fell, Jane could smell food cooking and hear plates rattling onto the table. The roasting smell grew thicker in the air, and steam that carried the scent of vegetables fogged the window. There was the creak of the oven door opening and then the thump of it closing. Mary's footsteps reached the doorway and she said, "Time to eat."

On the table were a roasted chicken, asparagus, carrots, and potatoes, an excess of food cooked absentmindedly without regard to the number of people at the table. They ate sparingly and with formality. When they were finished they cleared the table and washed the dishes without speaking. They were like two strangers stranded together in the only way station in the empty wilderness, surrounded by hundreds of miles of howling winds and drifting snow - not because they had decided to be together but because there was no other shelter.

Mary walked into her bedroom for a few minutes and came out to set a pillow and a thick quilt on the couch, then went inside again and closed the door. Jane went back to the window to watch. The snow fell for another two hours before she stood up and walked to the couch, pulled the quilt over her, and fell asleep.

In her dream a light, powdery snow was falling while she trotted ahead of her companion through the forest. It was cold, but she didn't feel the cruelty of it because she had worked up a light sweat. She ducked her head under spidery branches frosted with snow, knowing that if she bumped one, the snow would shower off onto the ground. Then pursuers would read that as clearly as a track, and the wind would be slower to cover it.

They were making their way south from Ann Arbor and she was watching for the rivers that fed into Lake Erie. First would be the Raisin, then the Maumee, then the Sandusky. This forest was wild country. Hunters from tribes from every direction came to get bear, deer, and beaver in the winter and passed through it in the summer on their way to kill each other. It had been full of armed men for a thousand years.

She listened to the breaths of the woman trotting along behind her, and at each breath there was more of her voice, more of a cry. Jane stopped and looked back. Mary Perkins had slowed down to a stagger, too tired to plant her feet in the trail Jane had broken for her, and now and then meandering to waste her strength fighting the deep drifts. Jane walked back in her own tracks and held Mary's arm as they walked. Mary tried to say something, but Jane pulled her near and whispered, "They could be close, so save your breath. Nothing does us any good but moving."

Mary didn't try to answer, so she returned her attention to the trail. It was important that they cover as much ground as they could while the snow was still falling to hide the signs of their passing. As soon as she had completed the thought, the snow stopped. The air was frosty and still, and their feet made loud crunching sounds each time they stepped on the unbroken snow.

The ones who were following them would be able to keep up a fast pace, running in their footsteps in the flat places where the going was easy, and avoiding the depressions where their tracks had sunk in deep. Jane was always looking ahead, using the glow of the moon on the snow to search for any irregularity in the terrain that she could use to hide their trail - a thicket or a fallen log or a frozen streambed leading to the next river.

Far behind, she heard the first call of the hunters. "Coo-wigh!" reached her in the still air, and it was answered by a whistle somewhere closer and to their left.

"We've got to run now," she whispered to Mary Perkins.

They stepped into a jog with Jane at the front again, keeping her strides short to push aside the snow and make the going easier for Mary. She heard more whistles, and then the report of a rifle off to the left, and there were faint voices behind. She stepped into a deep drift and fell, then scrambled out of it and saw the stream. They ran along it for about a mile. As Jane came around a bend she saw the platform. It stood alone on the bank, a row of poles lashed ten feet above the ground between two saplings. She could see that its surface had something on it, so she hurried to the thicker sapling and began to climb.

"What are you doing?" hissed Mary impatiently. "They're coming."

"We can't outrun them," Jane whispered. "They never get tired and they never give up. All you can ever do is fool them."

The sapling was smooth and half frozen, with a layer of frost on the northwest side that held the snow to it, but she hoisted herself up high enough to see what was on the platform. There was a haunch of venison with the hide still on it, and a fat chunk of flesh that could only be bear meat. Some hunter had stored it there to keep it frozen and high enough to be out of the reach of animals. Then she found the two pairs of snowshoes. She tossed them to the ground and dropped beside them.

She knelt in the snow and tied one pair on Mary Perkins backward, so the long narrow shaft was at the toe end. "Stay here. Don't move," she said, then ran along the streambed and into the woods where the hunters' trail began. She tied her own snowshoes on backward, made her way back to Mary Perkins and said, "Come on."

They stepped along more easily now, the snowshoes holding them on the surface of the snow. Jane followed the stream to the right for a hundred yards to the first place where the low plants penetrated the snowpack enough to complicate their trail, then turned right again, toward the east. They made a trail that looked as though it led in the opposite direction and belonged to the hunters who had cached their game on the platform.

When the first sunlight caught them, they were in a flat, open valley. Their trail stretched behind them for miles, and as soon as the sun was high enough to stir the morning wind, much of it would be blown away. She said to Mary Perkins, "Just one more run, to get out of the open before they see us."

They began to run due east, where Jane could see a row of evergreen bushes tall enough to hide the shape of a standing woman. She was tired now too. They had been moving silently for the whole night, never speaking for hours at a time, only concentrating on the awkward business of walking in snows hoes. They could see the end now, and it made Jane run faster. As soon as they reached the shelter of the bushes they would be able to sit and rest, maybe even sleep in turns while the wind blew across the valley and erased the shallow marks of their snowshoes. "Faster," she said to Mary. Everything would depend on how they behaved for the next few minutes. They ran until their breath came in short gasps and their legs were numb.

The sun was rising now right behind the row of evergreens, glaring through the upper branches and making it hard for Jane to focus her eyes on them to tell how far they were. She clenched her teeth and kept running, and then they were there. Jane dragged Mary between the first pair of trees, then five more steps into thicker cover where the trees were small and close together, and they both let themselves collapse into the soft snow.

Jane lay there, breathing deeply, feeling the cold flakes against her cheek but not caring. She started to raise herself to her elbows, and her eyes rested on the bushes. All around her, they began to topple over. The men who had been holding them let go, and they fell to the snow with a low, whispery. ugly swish. All of the bushes seemed to change into men as warriors stood up from behind the clumps of brush they had tied into blinds or shouldered aside the small trees they had stuck into the snow.

Rough, hard hands clutched her arms, a heavy, leather-clad body threw itself across her legs, and another pressed her face into the snow so that she nearly smothered. They bound her hands behind her, dragged her to her feet, and jerked her ahead. One of her snowshoes came off, but when she tried to stop and look down a push that felt like a punch propelled her forward, so she limped along a few steps before the other one came off too. She tried to glance behind her to see what had happened to Mary, but a hand on the small of her back shoved her on with such force that for an instant she saw the sky.

They marched them to a path that led up over the hill into the next river valley. As Jane climbed, she tried to get her strength back, but they kept her moving too fast. She heard a language that meant nothing to her. The sounds were gruff, guttural, and alien. When she reached the crest of the hill her heart stopped for a moment, then began to beat hard.

Stretched out below was a squalid, sprawling settlement that seemed to have been laid out by a madman. There were a few longhouses that looked as though Hurons or Eries had built them with no intention of living there long, interspersed with Algonquin wigwams made of bark and thatch, a few hide tents like the wandering plains people had, and in the center a clump of shanties made of boards. It was as though enemies of all of the wars of the Nundawaono had somehow survived in debased remnants and gathered here for the winter hunt.

As she stumbled down the steep path to the huge collection of ramshackle dwellings, she could see small shapes of people below, their shadows long in the bright dawn sunlight. One of them pointed upward and yelled something, and then men began to stream out of the shelters and gather in the center of the village. She could see them talking and pointing, and she could feel their excitement growing until, when she was dragged to the edge of the village, their voices rose in a shout that was harsh and deafening, full of hatred and glee. It grew louder as she moved closer to it, until she could feel her stomach vibrating with it, and the men started to fire their guns into the air, a ragged powpow pow powpow, like popcorn popping.

They prodded Jane and Mary across the dirty, mud-caked snow between the huts and pushed them into a big pen made of upright pine logs sharpened at the tops. Jane looked around her and saw to her surprise that there were dozens of other people already inside - men clinging to their wives and children, trying in vain to reach around all of them with their arms, other men who looked as though they had run the gauntlet on the way into the little pen, with limbs broken and faces streaked with blood from blows above the hairline, women with eyes swelled shut and missing teeth.

"What's going to happen?" asked Mary.

Jane said, "The fighting has gone on forever. So many people get killed that the main reason for it now is to get prisoners to adopt."

"Adopt? We're grown women."

"When people are killed they capture someone to take their place - their name, their work, their family."

The gate across the pen opened and about fifty warriors streamed in, painted and armed as though they had just returned from battle. They were agitated and angry, some of them in a frenzy, dancing from one foot to the other like boxers and shouting in the incomprehensible languages of enemies. One by one and with reluctance, they took notice of something behind them and stepped aside to let the one Jane had been watching for pass among them to the front.

Jane hung her head like the captives around her to give her a chance to study him without attracting his attention. She looked from his feet upward. He was big and muscular, wearing a clinging, whitish leather shirt that seemed to have been stitched together from many small pieces. Around his neck and shoulders hung a gateasha of six rows of small white wampum beads. When she forced her gaze to move upward, she nearly fainted.

He was wearing a Face. It was a scalp mask, painted bright red, with round staring copper eyes and the clenched teeth that made it resemble both the rage of battle and the ghastly grin of a rotting corpse. It was terrifying to see a Face here. She could tell that this was an old Face, the features that a supernatural being had shown to some virtuous Seneca ages ago in a dream. The Seneca had carved to free the Face from the trunk of a living basswood tree, given it presents of tobacco, rubbed it with sunflower oil, and fed it the same mixture of corn-meal and maple sugar that the warriors ate on the trail to battle. It didn't merely represent the supernatural being; it was the supernatural being. It gleamed with power strong enough to cure disease and change the weather, but on this man that power became the force of evil and witchcraft and death.

The Face approached and stared at her with its round, empty eyes. Jane could see now that the necklace was made not of little white shells but of human teeth. As he moved on, she realized with revulsion what the leather must be: strips of skin flayed from human beings. The Face walked around the pen, stopping in front of each captive to turn its round-eyed, unreadable gaze on him for a second or two, then moving on.

Finally the Face came back to where Jane was standing. The Face stopped and pointed at Mary. At once a warrior appeared out of the mob and poured a bucket of black, greasy paint over Mary Perkins's head. The paint streamed down to her shoulders and ran along her arms to her fingertips.

Mary gasped and sputtered. "Why did he do that? What is it, some kind of joke?"

"No," said Jane. She could feel waves of nausea that started in her chest and moved down to grip her belly.

Mary shivered with cold. "It must be an initiation, right?" Her voice was tense and scared now, and a little sob was audible in it. "Why me?" she wailed. "What do they want me to do?"

Jane tried to speak, but what she would have to say was impossible to put into words. The black paint was the sign that a captive had been selected to be burned.

19

Jane awoke in the darkness with her heart pounding. She walked to the window. The snow had stopped sometime during the night, and now the sidewalks and streets were white and still, but in the east the sky had changed enough to tell her there was no point in going back to the couch. She raised her hand to touch her forehead and rubbed away the beads of sweat that had formed there. She had been denying what she knew about Barraclough, and the knowledge was fighting its way to the surface in dreams.

She moved quietly into the kitchen and put the coffee on. Then she sat and listened to Mary waking up and remembering and making her way toward the smell of the brewing coffee. The door opened and Mary walked out into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and stood at the sink to drink it. "I've been thinking," she said. "I've been on my own most of my life and I think I can stay out of Barraclough's way if I don't do anything stupid." It was a question.

"It can be done." Jane sat still. It was time already. She would have to work up to it gradually, tell Mary what she knew and let her draw her own conclusion. "You just have to avoid doing anything stupid."

"Like getting my picture in the papers," Mary offered.

"Right," said Jane. "You might want to keep it off things like credit cards and driver's licenses too. Barraclough is the regional head of a very big detective agency, so he can probably find a way to have your picture circulated. You know, a reward for a missing person."

"I guess I can," Mary said. "And keep from getting arrested."

"Or fingerprinted."

"That's what I said."

"You've got to keep from being a victim too. If your house is burglarized or your car is stolen, they fingerprint the owner so they can identify prints that aren't supposed to be there. Some states take your prints for a driver's license. And a lot of employers require it; if you need to be bonded or licensed or need a security clearance, it's hard to avoid. Most companies hire a security service to handle the details and report the results - a service like Intercontinental."

Mary Perkins glared at her. "You're trying to scare me."

"Yes," said Jane. "It's better. I don't want to hear you sometime saying, 'Why me?'"

"All right," said Mary. "What else?"

Jane stared at the wall. "Well, they're not just passively waiting for you to turn up. They're searching. I know that because I talked to somebody who was hired to help. But the easiest way is to get you to come to them. You know - an announcement in the paper says some rich aunt of yours died and the following eighty people are named in the will. Or the help-wanted section says there's a job for a blue-eyed woman age thirty-four and a half and five feet four and seven eighths who's good at arithmetic. Or a personal ad says a wealthy widow with a large secluded mansion wants a roommate: a quiet female nonsmoker from the South who plays cribbage, or whatever else you do but not everyone does. Barraclough is perfectly capable of renting houses in the ten most likely places and having ten women sit there for a month waiting for you to show up."

"He'd do that?"

"Sure," said Jane. "It's quick, it's easy, and it's cheaper than the alternatives."

"What are those?"

"Well, you have a history. There are people you were close to. They'll go see them. Maybe watch to see if you come for a visit, or maybe bully them into telling what they know. If you ever left clothes anywhere when you started running, they'll have translated the labels into places where you might buy the next batch. The more expensive they were, the fewer places to buy them, and they know you'll need spring clothes or risk standing out. They'll also use them to construct a projection of how you're likely to look now. so they don't miss you in a public place: exact height, weight, style, and color preference. Then there's chemical analysis."

"What do they have to analyze?"

"If you wore perfume or cosmetics when you wore the clothes, they'll identify them and add them to your profile. If you love Thai food or going to the zoo, they'll know that too."

"That's crazy."

Jane shrugged. "No crazier than having people meet us in airports all over the western half of the country. Intercontinental is an enormous detective agency, much bigger than most police departments. There isn't a city in the country that doesn't have a crime lab with a trace-analysis section. There's a machine called a gas chromatograph that vaporizes whatever substance they find and identifies it. There's no question Intercontinental has one, and probably an emission spectrometer and an electron microscope. If you're in the business of tracking people for money, that stuff pays for itself quickly."

"You're making it sound hopeless."

"Not hopeless. It just takes some thought."

Mary protested. "But there are thousands of people in this country nobody can find."

"Millions," said Jane.

"Well, who are they? You can't tell me they all get caught."

"It depends on who's looking for them and how hard. A lot of them are divorce fugitives: the man who doesn't want to pay alimony or the parent who loses custody and takes the child out of state. Somebody else runs up a debt or embezzles a few bucks. Unless the person is foaming at the mouth and shooting people at freeway rest stops, the only ones who are very interested are the local police back home. Then there are a few million illegal aliens. There's not much reason to look for them because nobody gets any benefit from finding them. There are also personal cases: some woman breaks up with her boyfriend and he threatens her. There's practically no place where the police will do anything to help her, so she moves away and changes her name. There are millions of people hiding under assumed identities, and the reason most of them don't get found is that nobody's looking."

"What you're saying is that if anybody tried, they would."

"No," said Jane. "What I said is that it depends on who's looking and how hard."

"You think I'm going to get caught, don't you?"

Jane hesitated. "You can take that chance, or you can choose to take other chances."

"What does that mean?"

"He's not going to give up. He has lots of trained people at his disposal in offices all over the country, and he can probably dream up a charge to get the police looking for you too, if he wants to. If you learn fast and never make a mistake, he might not find you." Jane looked at her closely. "Or you could make a mistake - intentionally."

Mary's eyes widened and the color seemed to drain from her face. "You want to use me for - "

"Bait. Yes. What he's doing isn't just evil; it's also illegal."

"I can't. I don't have the money. You're wrong. He's wrong."

"It doesn't matter. He thinks you do, and he wants it. That makes him predictable, and that can be turned into a weakness. Your chance of trapping him and getting him convicted might be better than your chance of hiding from him."

"No. I won't do it." Mary looked at Jane defiantly.

"Suit yourself."

"Are you leaving this morning?"

"I said I'd help you get settled."

"But I told you I wouldn't do it. You can't use me as bait."

"I heard you."

For the next six days, Jane Whitefield waited. When Mary woke up she would find the quilt folded neatly and stowed beside the couch. Jane would be in the middle of the only open space in the small living room going through the slow, floating movements of Tai Chi.

On the sixth day, Mary Perkins said, "Why do you do that?"

"It keeps my waist thin and my ass from getting flabby."

Mary repeated, "Why do you do that?"

"It helps me feel good. It keeps me flexible. It helps me think clearly and concentrate."

"Don't worry," said Mary. "I'll shut up."

"You don't have to," said Jane. "Part of the idea is that after a while the body makes the movements flow into each other without consulting the conscious mind much."

"What's that one?"

"What do you mean?"

"They all have names, right?"

"Oh. 'Cloud Hands.'" Then her body was in a radically different position without much apparent movement. " 'Golden Cock Stands on Leg.'" Her body continued to drift into a changing pattern of positions.

Mary watched for a long time. "Where did you learn to fight?"

"By fighting."

"No," said Mary. "I mean fight like that."

"This isn't exactly about fighting. It's about not fighting. Your opponent is fighting, but you're watching. He attacks, but you've already begun to yield the space. He strikes, but you're not really there. You only passed through there on your way to somewhere else. You bring his force around in a circle, add yours to it, and let him hurt himself."

"The mystic wisdom of the mysterious East."

"It's practical. I'm a very strong woman, but no matter what I do, I'm going to be smaller than any man who's likely to try to hurt me. If I fight him for the space between us, I'll get hammered. He's using one arm and maybe his back foot to throw the punch. I'm bringing my whole body into one motion to add force to his punch and alter its direction just a little. For that fraction of a second I have him outnumbered."

Mary put on her coat, walked toward the door, opened it, turned, and said. "You should have let your ass get flabby. It might have made you more human." She went out and closed the door. That night she came home late and tiptoed past Jane on the couch.

Two hours later Jane opened her eyes and acknowledged that she had heard Mary come out of her room again. It was three a.m. and she was sitting in the big easy chair staring at Jane.

Mary said, "You're trying to wear me down. You're staying in the corner of my room and not saying anything to convince me, just putting yourself in front of my eyes wherever I look so I'll have to think about it."

Jane said, "You've spent time with people who take what they want."

"I was one of them."

"Then you can predict what Barraclough is thinking as well as I can. You don't need any arguments from me."

Mary sat back in the big chair with her hands resting on the arms. "Why haven't you mentioned the little boy?"

"Why should I?"

"I've lived by convincing people to do stupid things they didn't want to do, so I know how it's done. The little boy is an overlooked resource. Here I am, unmarried and alone, and anybody who is alive can feel her biological clock ticking away. I've reached the age where women start getting too many cats. The little boy is alone and probably scared. Barraclough has already robbed him, and now he'll kill him."

"Will he?"

"You know he will, and that's why you're here. If the kid's dead, the cops will run around bumping into each other for a couple of months and then forget him. If he's alive, there's always the chance that Barraclough will wind up sitting in a courtroom across the aisle from an innocent ten-year-old."

"Not much chance."

"But as long as the kid is alive, there's also the chance that he'll live another ten or fifteen years and find out who killed his four best friends and left him broke. Barraclough will be thinking he doesn't want to wake up some night and find a young man who looks vaguely familiar holding a gun against his head." Mary waited a few seconds. "So why didn't you mention him again?"

Jane sat up and stared at her. "People are killed every day. Why would I imagine you would pick him out of all the thousands and say, 'You're the one I've chosen. I've trained myself since I was a baby to ignore the screams of the dying because if I let even a little of the sound in I couldn't hear or think of anything else. But for you I'll risk my own life.'"

"You're right, I wouldn't." She leaned forward. "But not saying it is the argument, isn't it? I'm supposed to think of doing it, and if I think of it, I have to admit a second later that I'm not the kind of person who does that, and wonder why not."

"I apologize for telling you about him."

"But he's the reason why you're doing this, isn't he?"

"There's not much more I can do for him. I was in a fight, and all of the people on my side except Timmy are dead. That's all."

"I don't suppose the money has anything to do with it."

"For me? Not this time."

"You're above that kind of consideration."

"Hardly," said Jane. "I have enormous expenses. But money is not a pressing problem. Once you have what you need, it's hard to get yourself to lean over a cliff to reach for more. And I can't even spend what I have. A fancier house or a lot of expensive jewelry raises my profile and maybe gets me killed."

"Then why does this kid's money matter to you?"

"Or your money either? It's important only because it's what Barraciough wants. He uses it to grow stronger. I don't want him to succeed. I don't want to feed him."

"Why do you care?"

"I'm the rabbit, he's the dog. I run, he chases. He's good at it, and he's getting better. He's using Intercontinental to recruit young guys with nothing much to do and criminal records that make it unlikely that anybody else will ever pay them to do anything. He's picking out the ones with a certified history of violence and training them to hunt."

"We're finally getting down to a reason that means something. You're afraid he might get to be a problem, aren't you? Not just to people like me, but to you."

"He already is. If I let him get stronger, eventually he'll kill me."

Mary slumped back in her chair and breathed a deep, windy sigh. "At last. Thank you."

"You haven't changed your mind, have you?"

"No, but now maybe I can sleep. You're no better than I am."

When Mary came out into the living room again it was nearly noon. She looked at Jane and her face seemed to deflate. "You^'re still here."

"Even if you won't help me get Barraclough, it's still to my advantage to make sure he doesn't get you."

"How long do I have to live like this?"

"After we get you working, it will be easier," said Jane. "We'll study the other women here - shop where they shop and buy what they buy. Everything you do has to keep your head down where there are lots of other heads."

Mary looked as though she were considering it. "How long do I have to do this?"

Jane shrugged. "The longer you do it, the safer you'll be. Most women live quiet, private lives, and most women are basically happy. It helps to make new friends and be part of a community. If you look at the way your friends live, you'll feel better, and that will keep you from getting lazy."

"Lazy?"

"The average person sets an alarm to get up early, goes to work, has a little leisure time, sets the alarm, and goes to bed. The weeks get long, and people don't get paid what they deserve. There will come a day when you can't get your mind off some fantasy - a week in the Bahamas, or maybe only a dress you saw in a magazine. It doesn't matter what it is. Live within your means. I mean your visible means."

Mary's face turned hard and her eyes glittered. "I'm not sure I understand."

"Don't touch the money that's in Zurich or Singapore."

"I told you: there is no money." She stared at Jane for a long time, waiting for the contradiction.

Jane sat motionless and returned her stare evenly. Finally Mary angrily jumped to her feet, threw on her coat, and walked out the door. When Jane heard the dull thump of the door at the bottom of the stairs, she stood up, put on her coat, and prepared to go out too. She had a lot of work to do.

20

The Detroit-Wayne County airport was only twenty-six miles east of Mary Perkins's apartment on Route 94. The flight was not even three hundred miles, so when Jane Whitefield emerged from the gate at O'Hare, the clock on the wall said 3:10. The taxi took her to the State Street mall and she walked two blocks along East Madison Street. On another day she might have had the taxi driver leave her farther away, but last night's snow had reached Chicago by morning, and today the wind was picking it up and moving it along between the big buildings in horizontal sheets. Most pedestrians were just scurrying across the open to get from one building to another, and she saw none who might have followed her.

She reached the Bank of Illinois before four o'clock and was behind the counter in a quiet cubicle opening her safe-deposit box within five minutes. Months ago she had come to Chicago to pay the bill for the Furnace corporation's post office box, shop for clothes, and store Catherine Snowdon's papers. She took them out and studied them. Catherine Snowdon had a birth certificate, a driver's license, a Social Security card, a Visa card, and an ATM card from the Bank of America in case she needed cash. Jane examined the other papers in the box.

That left only Wendy Lewis, Karen Gottlieb, and Anne Bronstein. She examined their papers to reassure herself that she had not let any of the expiration dates go by. Then she put them back under the savings passbook and the nine-millimeter Beretta pistol, closed the box, and rang for the lady who would go with her to return it to its slot in the vault.

A guide needed more insurance policies than any of her clients, but she could spare Catherine Snowdon for Mary Perkins. She would hide the Catherine Snowdon papers with ten thousand dollars in cash somewhere within walking distance of Mary's apartment in case she had to bail out.

Jane caught a cab from the Dirksen Building on West Adams and flew back to Detroit to do some shopping. At a Toys "R" Us she found a toy called Musical Moves. If the child stepped in the right places on a brightly colored mat, he could play a tune electronically. Jane would redirect the wire so that instead the pressure on the mat would send current to a small lightbulb. Two would be better - one mounted inside the apartment and one somewhere outside - maybe in the mailbox, if it could be done without alarming the letter carrier. If the bulb was lit, Mary Perkins would know that somebody was in her apartment waiting for her.

At a hardware store she bought the tools, wires, electrical tape, and a rope ladder designed for getting out a second-floor window in an emergency. She decided these purchases would be enough for the present. Mary had a lot to get used to in a short time, and she would be less likely to make mistakes in a crisis if she wasn't distracted by complexity.

Jane stopped at a pay telephone and dialed her own number. She heard the telephone ring four times and then heard her own voice. "Hello. Please leave a message at - " Jane quickly punched in her two-digit code, then heard the machine rewind. It seemed to be taking a long time. Then there were a couple of clicks and Carey McKinnon's voice.

"Jane? It's Carey. I know you're probably calling in for messages, and this is the only way I have to reach you. I'm sorry I had to go back to the hospital the other night. Give me a call when you can - at home or the hospital or my office. If I'm in surgery or something, leave me a number where I can reach you." The machine's computer voice said, "Tuesday, ten-fifteen a.m."

Carey's voice came on again. "Hi, Jane. Just me again. It's been a few days and you still haven't called me. Am I imagining that you said you would? I'm in my usual haunts."

"Saturday," said the machine, "two thirty-six p.m."

The next one said, "I'm beginning to think you're mad at me or something. If you are, please call me up and yell at me. Two weeks is a long time to sit around wondering."

"Friday, six fifty-two p.m."

Jane hung up the telephone and then dialed Carey's number. When his machine came on, she said, "Hi, Carey. It's me. I'm sorry I couldn't get back to you. This job has turned out to be just awful. I'm trying to help a woman make her business profitable, and her business is promoting products all over the country. I've been in more airports than... a couple more than my suitcase has, anyway. I always seem to be strapped into an airplane seat when you're home, and then we have to sit down and run figures for the next meeting the minute we're in a hotel, and get to the meeting by breakfast time. Enough whining. I'm not mad at you. I'll call you when I'm home." She caught herself before she said "I love you" because he had never said it to her, but then she felt foolish for being petty. She changed it into "I miss you," then hung up. She tested the sound of it in her mind and decided it was true, as far as it went. She did miss him.

There had been two or three friends in college who had known that she had a knack for hiding people, but Carey McKinnon had not been one of them. Each year thereafter it would have been harder to tell him, but that was not why she had avoided it. She had been saving him for herself. She needed to keep home a safe place where she could talk to people who cared about her and forget that the next day she might have to take a fugitive out of the world. But she had planted a lie that had grown thick enough to choke her. Now that he had asked her to marry him, she could barely stand to talk to his answering machine.

As she stepped off the curb, she realized that the only solution she had thought of was to perpetuate the lie - tell him the profession she was quitting was the consulting business - and not admit to him that she was not the person he thought he knew. She would only be doing what she had taught dozens of other people to do - pick the life you want and lie fifty times a day to get it - so she felt ashamed that the prospect seemed so empty and hopeless to her.

Then she recognized that she was thinking about it as though she had decided to marry Carey. She had not decided. The time to decide about marriage was when you had reason to assume you would be alive on your wedding day.

Jane took a bus back to Ann Arbor and got off at the university. She did not begin the walk down Huron Street back to the apartment until after midnight. She had taken a longer time than necessary to give Mary Perkins a day alone. The more time Mary had to think, the better she would be.

As Jane walked up Huron in the cold, still air, listening to her feet crunching the snow, she began to hear another sound, far off behind her. It started low and quickly moved up an octave a second until she recognized it as a siren. She walked along, listening to it grow louder and closer, until she heard it pass her on a parallel street. A minute later, she heard another set of sirens coming toward her from somewhere ahead and to her right.

She watched the intersections ahead and saw the blinking lights of a fire engine swing around a corner and head out Huron Street. After another block she began to smell the smoke in the air. It was a thin, hanging haze like the smoke from somebody's fireplace in the windless night. She began to walk faster, and at the next corner she turned down a side street. It was a two-alarm fire so far, and there was no point in walking into the middle of a lot of firemen and policemen after midnight carrying shopping bags. At the first corner she turned right along the street behind Huron and hurried on.

When she was still two blocks from the big old house where Mary lived, she could see the sky suddenly begin to glow. She dropped her bags and broke into a run. It must be the house. As she ran up the quiet residential street, she began to see other people coming out of apartments and houses and walking toward the fire.

When Jane turned back onto Huron, she could see the trucks lined up in front of Mary's house. The coats of the firemen were glowing, their wet helmets reflecting the flames that were now coming out of the lower windows and licking up the wooden clapboards toward the upper floor.

Jane forced herself to slow her pace to a fast walk, looking carefully at every human shape illuminated by the fire. She tried to recognize one that might be Mary, already almost certain that she would not see her. The fire didn't make sense unless they had made a mistake and killed her. They had set a fire not because it would fool a coroner - Farrell, the training officer, would have taught them that much - but because fire got rid of fingerprints and fibers, and because water and firemen's boots obliterated footprints.

She moved into the curious crowd and began to study the faces of the people who had gathered in a big circle around the fire. She wasn't looking for Mary anymore; she was looking for any face that she had seen before.

She heard the loud blip-blip of another siren and saw another set of lights sweep around the corner and stop at the curb thirty feet behind a fire truck. The new vehicle was an ambulance. Jane moved toward it, weaving her way between spectators who were so intent on the fire that they seemed to be unaware of her passing.

She edged closer to the ambulance and watched the two paramedics haul their collapsible stretcher out the back and rush, not to Mary's house but up the other side of the hedge to the lawn of the house next door. Jane felt a tiny resurgence of hope that she could not suppress. Maybe that was where the firemen had taken the victims - out of their way and out of danger - and if the paramedics were in a hurry, they must believe they had a patient waiting for them, not a corpse.

Jane followed the paramedics. They hurried up the lawn until they reached a pair of firemen in gas masks who were kneeling over somebody lying prone on the snow beyond the hedge. One of the firemen had an oxygen tank on his back like a scuba diver, and he was holding the mask over the face of the person on the ground. Jane held her breath as the four men slid the victim onto the stretcher. When they lifted it to unfold the legs, she let her breath out in disappointment. The person on the stretcher was wearing a black rubber turnout coat and high boots. One of the firemen must have collapsed from the smoke.

She turned away and looked at the house. The top floor had caught now, and she could see the flames eating their way through the inner walls. In a few minutes the roof would collapse into Mary Perkins's apartment and the killers would have accomplished what Barraclough's training officer had taught them to do when things went wrong.

She watched the firemen straining to hold the hoses steady while they sprayed enormous streams of water into the upper windows. She glanced at a couple of firemen coming around the house carrying long pike poles. Their faces had dark, grimy smoke stains around the eyes and on the foreheads where their masks had not covered, their coats and pants glistened with water and dripped on the snow as they trotted toward their truck. She whirled around in time to see the four men pushing the stretcher toward the back of the ambulance. The injured fireman's turnout coat wasn't wet. He had been in there long enough to succumb to the smoke, but he didn't have a drop on him. The two firemen who had been kneeling over him were dry too.

Jane moved quickly in a diagonal path toward the ambulance, keeping her eyes on the stretcher. They had the tie-down restraints strapped over a blanket they'd draped over the turnout coat, and the mask still over the face. She couldn't see the hair because they had a pillow under the head and their bodies shielded it from view. As they reached the lighted street she stared hard at the side of the blanket, where a couple of the victim's fingers protruded an inch. The red, whirling light from the fire truck just ahead passed across them and glinted off a set of tapered, polished fingernails. It was Mary Perkins.

Jane stepped around the front of the ambulance, slipped into the driver's door, and crouched on the floor. She heard the back doors open, the sliding of the metal wheels of the stretcher, and then the back doors slammed. She climbed into the seat, threw the transmission into gear, stepped on the gas pedal, and veered away from the curb to avoid the fire engine parked thirty feet ahead.

Then she straightened her wheels and roared down the block. She glanced in the rearview mirror. The four men took a couple of steps after her, then seemed to see the futility of it and stopped in the street. Before she turned the corner at the first traffic signal she looked again, but she couldn't see them anymore.

She drove fast for five blocks, letting the siren clear the way for her, and then turned into a smaller street, flipped off the flashing lights and siren, and went faster.

"Mary!" she called. There was no answer. It occurred to her that the gas in the fireman's tank had probably not been oxygen. It could as easily have been medical anesthetic. If it was, Mary was about as likely to die as recover. Jane drove on for another minute, then pulled the van to a stop in the lot behind a school. She ran to the back of the ambulance, opened the door, climbed inside, and looked down at Mary. She could see that her eyes were wide open, and then they blinked.

"You're alive after all,'" said Jane. She pulled at the oxygen mask and saw that it was held by a piece of elastic behind the head, so she slipped it up and off. There was a wide strip of adhesive tape across Mary's mouth. She undid the top straps on the stretcher.

Mary quickly sat up and fumbled to free her own feet. She was sobbing and shaking, and kicking at the strap so hard that her own hands couldn't hold on to it. Jane undid that strap too. "You'd better take the tape off your own mouth," she said.

Mary clawed at it and gave a little cry of pain as she tore it off. "They trapped me!" she sobbed. "There was no other way out." She shook the heavy turnout coat off, and Jane could see they had slipped it over the jacket she had put on to escape the fire. "There was smoke, and they banged on the door, and they looked like firemen. One of them gave me an oxygen mask, and - "

"I know," said Jane. "Come on. We've got to get out of here."

"Can't you just keep going?" Mary looked at the driver's seat, willing Jane into it.

"No. We're already pushing our luck. They'll be looking for the ambulance. I assume it's stolen, so the police will be too." She pulled Mary to her feet, pushed her out the back door, and said, "Run with me."

Mary stood against the ambulance. She took a step in the fireman's boots, her beige pants bloused over the tops just below her knees, then stopped and pulled her jacket around her. "I can't."

"Try," said Jane simply. She slung her purse across her chest and started off across the lot at a slow, easy trot. After a few steps she heard Mary running too.

Jane jogged onto the broad back lawn of the school. It seemed to be a high school because all of the athletic fields were full-sized and elaborate, with wooden bleachers beside them. The grass under the snow was level and clear, with no chance of any unseen obstacles. Even better, there were tracks on it where she could place her feet. When she was in the open away from the building she could feel the wind blowing tiny particles of snow against her cheeks. Now was the time to set a quick pace, before some cop arrived to find the ambulance. She waited until she thought Mary Perkins was warm and loose, then lengthened her strides a bit. The playing fields were an advantage because she could lead them out a quarter of a mile away on a street far from the path of the ambulance. But while they were out here they would be the only black spots on an ocean of empty white snow.

She looked over her shoulder at Mary and saw that she interpreted the look as permission to slow down. Jane turned ahead again and quickly worked her way up to a comfortable lope. She listened to Mary's footsteps and timed her breathing. She was not used to running, but she seemed to be doing it.

When Jane reached the goalpost at the end of the football field, she stopped and ran in place until Mary caught up. She said, "We'll be able to walk as soon as we reach cover," and started off again. This time it seemed to be a soccer field because it was longer. She could discern what was at the end of the school property now. There was a high chain-link fence, and beyond it some tall, leafless trees. She ran ahead to look for the gate.

She found it in a few seconds, but it had a thick chain and a serious padlock on it. She looked back to see Mary struggling to catch up. She could see that there were tracks all over the field. Unless kids had changed a lot since she was in high school they would never walk an extra quarter mile just to get around a fence. She moved along the fence and saw the answer. There was a city parking lot beyond the fence, filled with plows, dump trucks, tractors, and a forage harvester parked beside a building that looked like a warehouse. The parking lot was empty of cars, but it was clear of snow because they had used the plows to push an enormous pile of snow up against the fence nearly to its top eight feet up.

Mary came up behind her, breathing deeply but not in distress. Jane said, "How are you at climbing fences?"

"Take a guess."

"I'll help you," said Jane. "All we have to do is get to the top. We can walk down." She took Mary's arm and pointedly placed her hand on a chain link above her head. She began to climb, and Jane waited for the moment to come when she decided she couldn't do it.

Mary stopped. "I don't think - "

Jane reached up, put both hands on her thighs, and boosted her higher. "Do the work with your legs. Toes in the spaces, step up. Just use your hands to hold on. Step up. Good. Step up." She climbed up after her, and when Mary reached the intimidating part, where the packed snow was above the top of the fence, she said, "Step up," held on to the fence with one hand, and pushed Mary hard with the other so that she rolled up onto the mountain of snow.

When Jane reached the top and flopped onto the snow she found Mary still lying there, breathing deeply and trying to get her heart to slow. Jane sat up for a second, then clucked down and burrowed into the snow. "Stay down," she said.

A beam of light moved across the field. Jane could see it pass above their heads, lighting up thousands of tiny snowflakes that had been blown into the air by the wind. The police car was beside the ambulance, so the beam widened in the thousand feet of empty fields and became enormous, but it was still so bright that she could see the line of adhesive the tape had left on Mary's cheek.

Mary asked, "Is it - "

"Cops," said Jane. "In a minute they'll shut the light off. When they do, don't move."

The light swept across the field, came back, continued around the horizon, and then went out. "Rest," said Jane. "Use this time to rest." They lay in the darkness and she listened. Suddenly the light came on again, swept over their heads, and shot back and forth around the field. She listened for the sound of the engine, but it didn't come. Finally the light went off. "Okay," said Jane. "Now we move." She sat up a little, slid down the hill, and waited while Mary followed.

They hurried to the far side of the lot, where the gate to the street was, and stopped. This gate was locked with the same kind of padlock and chain as the first one. She looked up at the fence. It was as high as the first, but it had coils of barbed wire strung along the top. They couldn't go back because the police wouldn't leave until they had a tow truck hooked up to the ambulance. She looked around her. There were sure to be cutting tools in the low building at the side of the lot, but breaking in would be harder than getting over a fence, and at least the fence didn't have an alarm. There were trucks, tractors, and plows all over the place, but even if she managed to hot-wire one of them to crash the gate, the sound of the engine would bring the police car across the field in twenty seconds. Then her eyes sorted out the strange shapes at the other end of the yard.

"All right," she said. "I hope you're strong, because I'll need your help."

She ran to the corner of the little compound, past the swing sets stored for the winter and the playground merry-go-rounds and over to the slides. The first two had frames of welded steel pipes that made them too heavy. The third was made of thin fiberglass in the shape of a tube, and Jane could lift the end of it by herself. They dragged it to the fence, lifted it so that the ladder was on their side and the tube went over the barbed wire and out to the street. "Want to go first?" asked Jane.

Mary climbed the ladder, slipped her legs into the tube, and flew out the other end onto the snow. Then Jane slid down and fell in the same spot. Mary was impatient to get away from the fence now, but Jane said, "If we don't move it, the cops will figure it out without having to get out of their car. Help me." They pushed the tube back over into the compound, then started down the street.

"Where are we going?" asked Mary.

"The university."

They jogged the last mile in silence. Jane set the pace again and listened for Mary's footsteps. She glanced at her watch. It was after two a.m. now, and even close to the university there were no pedestrians. Twice she saw headlights far down the street and pulled Mary with her into the dark space between two houses until the car had passed. When they finally reached the university campus, Jane slowed to a walk. She heard Mary's footsteps hit hard for two or three more steps, and then they sounded softer and slower too.

Jane walked on, studying the buildings for a long time. Finally she pointed to a long four-story building. The name on the facade was Helen Mileham Hall. Jane stopped a hundred feet away. "That wouldn't be a bad place to get out of the cold."

Mary Perkins said, "What is it?" She was so exhausted that her voice sounded almost detached.

"I think it's a women's dormitory," said Jane.

"It's the middle of the night. Won't it be locked?"

"Of course," said Jane. She wished she hadn't mentioned the cold. They were both heated from their run, but the night air was already beginning to dry the sweat on her face and leave it numb. The front door was out of the question. It led into a reception area that looked like a hotel lobby. She could see that there was an intercom and some kind of electronic locking system on the glass door. She supposed she had been in the last generation of coeds who had curfews, so probably there was no old bat to take the names of girls who came in late, but the world had gotten more dangerous for women since then, so they would have something worse, like an old bat in a guard's uniform with a .357 Magnum strapped to her hip. She walked around the building once looking for the fire doors while Mary waited. Then she heard the sound of the dryer.

As Jane walked toward it she walked into her memory. When a girl was eighteen and away from home for the first time, nights like this came now and again. The term papers and the laundry had piled up at about the same rate, and it was a Friday night near the end of the fall semester. The music and the shouting in the dorm had died out, but she wasn't ready to lie in the dark yet because even though morning would come with nauseating punctuality in a few hours, she was still eighteen and restless. She would convince herself that what she was doing was eminently practical. She could use all the laundry machines at once if she had enough quarters, and the silence and the solitude would make the term paper better.

The girl was sitting across from the dryers with her feet on a chair, underlining passages in a textbook. The laundry room was hot and humid from the washers and dryers, and she had the door propped open to let the steamy air out.

Jane hurried to the corner of the building and beckoned to Mary. Then she moved to the wall of the building, stepped close to the door, and looked at it. There was a crash bar that pulled a dead bolt out of a hole in the floor, and there was a standard spring latch that fit into the jamb. She opened her purse, pulled six dimes out of her wallet, and leaned behind the door to reach out and slide them into the hole in the floor. Then she came over to Mary and whispered. "What did you do with the tape they put over your mouth?"

"What?" whispered Mary.

"I didn't see you throw it away. Where is it?"

Mary said, "I don't know. I guess I..." She reached into her pocket. "Here it is." It was in a wad.

Jane took it, stepped far back from the door and away from the light, came back to the doorjamb, and stuffed it into the hole where the latch would go when the door shut. Then she beckoned to Mary and they both went across the dormitory lawn to sit on a curb and wait.

In fifteen minutes the girl's dryers stopped and she folded her clothes, kicked the doorstop up, and closed the door slowly and quietly. It was almost three in the morning and she didn't need a couple of hundred neighbors waking up angry.

Jane waited a few minutes longer before she opened the door, pulled the adhesive tape out of the doorjamb, dug the dimes out of the hole, and pulled Mary inside. She shut the door, and they made their way up the back stairs to the second floor, away from the public areas to the long corridors lined with students' rooms. Jane walked quietly through the halls of the dormitory, looking at the doors of all of the rooms. At each corner she stopped and listened for other footsteps, but she heard none. Finally she stopped at a door where there was a folded note taped at eye level. She pulled it off carefully and read it.

Cindy - Your mother called like eight times!!! I told her you were in the library. Call her as soon as you get back from Columbus.

Lauren

Jane slipped the Catherine Snowdon credit card between the doorknob and the jamb until she found the plunger, then bowed it a little to push the plunger aside and open the door. Before she closed it behind Mary she put the note back. Cindy was going to need time to prepare a comforting story for her mother.

Jane felt for the single bed by the wall, pulled the thick blanket off it and draped it over the rod behind the curtains so that no light would escape, then turned the switch on. She went to the closet and studied the clothes for a moment, then started taking things out. "She's about your height, but she wears her tops big." She tossed a sweater on the bed. "Put it on." She took off her own blouse and slipped another sweater over her head. Then she glanced at Marys rubber boots. "Those aren't going to help us either. Try some of hers."

Within a few minutes they were both dressed in Cindy's clothes. There was one short fall coat and one University of Michigan jacket. It was reversible, so Jane pulled it inside out and put it on. There were places where she could still pass as a college girl, but a college was not one of them. She counted a thousand dollars out of her purse and set it on the desk. "Sorry, Cindy," she wrote on Cindy's pad. "I needed clothes." She turned to Mary. "You look good, considering. Let's go."

Jane led Mary out through the laundry room, then found the Student Union by walking toward the center of the campus. The Ride Board was something she remembered from her college days, and she found it in a big hallway off the entrance. There were index cards posted in long lines on a cork bulletin board. She ignored the "Ride Wanted" cards and looked closely at the "Going to..." cards. Most of them offered rides for Thursday night or Friday, so they were obsolete already. She selected one that said, "Going to Ohio State. Leaving for Columbus Saturday 5:00 a.m. Return after game. Share driving and gas. Doug," and gave a phone number. She glanced at her watch. It was four a.m. now. If Doug wasn't an idiot he was at least awake. She walked to the pay phone across the hall and dialed the number.

At five o'clock the car pulled up in front of the Student Union. Doug was big and smiled easily. He was the sort of boy who would shortly flesh out and play a lot of golf. His two passengers were a surprise to him. While he was driving from his room to the campus he had planned to say he was glad that they had turned up at the last minute because he loved company. He also liked making a road trip without having to pay all of the expenses himself, but better than either, he liked women. He liked looking at them and hearing their voices and smelling the scents that hung in the air around them. When he saw the two women walking down the steps of the Student Union he thought that this was turning out to be a very fortunate day. But when they got into the car and the light came on he realized that they were old. They weren't old like somebody's mother, but they were still too old to be any more interested in Doug than his female professors were.

Near the ramp for the 23 Expressway at Geddes Avenue, Doug started to signal for a turn into the all-night gas station, but the dark one said, "Can we stop for gas later? There's nobody on the road now and we can make good time. Later on we'll be dying to stop."

Doug could live with that. The gauge said they had half a tank, so it didn't really matter. But for a second it seemed to him that she had some other reason for not wanting to stop until she was out of Ann Arbor. It was as though her husband was cruising around looking for her or something. They didn't stop until Toledo, and then the dark one insisted on paying for the gas and driving the next hundred miles.

It turned out that the one in the back was a graduate student in the business school. She had worked for ten years and then decided to go back. She was asleep most of the time. The dark one was a lot more talkative. She was a friend of the graduate student, and had talked her into going down for the game. Maybe she wasn't really that talkative, because afterward he couldn't remember learning anything else about her in the four-hour drive. Maybe she had just prompted Doug to talk and smiled a lot.

When they were on the outskirts of Columbus, the dark one announced that they still had to go scrounge tickets to the game, because she had talked Alene into coming at the last minute on a whim. She had him drop them off on the Ohio State campus so they could check the bulletin boards for offers of unused tickets.

Doug hated to relinquish the fantasy he had been developing for four hours, revising and refining it at each turn in the long road. He had envisioned himself ending up in a hotel in Columbus with the two older women, celebrating Michigan's victory on a king-sized bed. But he had not been able to invent any plausible set of circumstances that might lead to the fulfillment of this fantasy, nor could he imagine how one went about proposing such a thing. He left them with a regret that hung about him until later in the day, when he met a girl named Michele who called herself Micki with an i. She had seen him on the Ohio State campus with the two older women and convinced herself that there was a melancholy sophistication about him. He did not think about the two older women again until Sunday night, when he was driving back to Michigan with Micki. It had occurred to him that they might not have been able to get tickets to the game, but he would not have guessed that instead they had bought airline tickets from Columbus to Boston under assumed names and disappeared during the stopover in Cleveland.

21

Mary lay on her bed in the motel room and listened to the airplanes passing overhead. She had already unconsciously perceived their rhythm. They would growl along for four minutes somewhere far beyond the eastern end of the building, then roar overhead and into nothingness. There would be a pause of forty-five seconds before she heard the next one growling and muttering at the starting line.

Mary was tired of waiting for the question. She turned her head to look at Jane. "It was the medical records," she said.

Jane was sitting at the round table under the hideous hanging lamp sorting small items she had taken from her purse. There was a lot of cash, and cards that seemed to have been taped to the lining in rows. "What medical records?" She didn't look up.

"You were the one who made me think of it. I wanted to do it the way you would. I went to a doctor in Ann Arbor. I asked for the form people send to their old doctors to get their records forwarded. I signed it and changed the doctor's address so they would send it to me."

"Why did you do that?" asked Jane. "Do you have some condition that needs to be watched?"

Mary Perkins shook her head. "It just seemed like the right thing to do - to have them. Now, before something happened. I was going to change my name on them and bring them to the new doctor on the first visit. I couldn't think of a reason why a woman my age wouldn't have records somewhere, and I knew I could never make some up. And they're confidential; they're supposed to be protected."

Jane sighed. "They are. The address where they're sent isn't."

"Oh. But how did Barraclough's people get it?"

"There are a lot of ways. You pose as Mary Perkins's probation officer and ask. Or you get a person hired to work in the office so she can watch for the right piece of paper to come in the mail. They might have wanted a copy of your records anyway to see if you had a condition that meant you had to keep seeing one of fifteen specialists in the country, or needed a particular kind of surgery or something. They could even do the same thing you did: send a note from a real doctor requesting the records. The old doctor's secretary would say they'd already been sent to such and such an address. I don't know, and it doesn't matter very much. Did you get them?"

"Get what?"

"The medical records."

"Oh. Sure." She looked uncomfortable. "They got burned up."

"Good." Jane went back to her sorting. "It's one more avenue Barraclough had that he doesn't have anymore."

Mary's voice began in a quiet tone that was low-pitched and tense, as though she were flexing her throat muscles to keep her vocal cords from tightening. "They started the fire while I was asleep in the house, you know. They didn't do it so nobody would know they had been there. They made me come out to them because they were dressed like firemen who were there to save me. I couldn't see their faces, just the masks and helmets and raincoats."

"I know," said Jane.

"I'm not trying to tell you what happened," said Mary Perkins. "I'm trying to tell you what happened to me." She said more softly, "To me." She stared at Jane's face for a reaction, and what she saw told her Jane was waiting. "I'm new at this," she said again. "For you it's like herding cattle around. It's not just taking care of them; it's making sure they don't stampede off a cliff or eat poison or drink so much water that their stomachs rupture."

"There's nothing to be ashamed of," said Jane. "They had you. It wasn't something you imagined."

"They do that too. They talk softly to the cattle and say, 'Come on, girl. It's okay.' But it's not exactly true and it's not exactly for the cow's benefit." Mary took a deep breath. "I'm not used to being the only one who doesn't know things, and I'm not used to this way of looking at the world. I guess I should have had enough imagination to figure out what it was like. I once knew some people slightly who were supposed to be very tough, but I never saw any of them actually do anything. I keep looking back and wondering how I ever got from being eighteen and smart and pretty all the way to being twice that and having men I never saw before burning me out of a house."

Jane shrugged. "You told me how it happened."

"No," said Mary Perkins. "No, I didn't. I told you what happened to some savings and loan companies. Not what happened to me."

Jane stopped sorting and began to string together credit cards and licenses with strips of adhesive tape. She did not dare look at Mary for fear there would be something in her eyes that gave Mary permission to stop talking.

"In the summer of 1981 I was twenty-two. I had just graduated from Florida State. I was good at interviews - I could tell that they liked me - but I couldn't seem to get a job. I remember coming home and closing the door to my bedroom upstairs. I would take off my outfit and hang it up carefully so my makeup wouldn't ruin it when I flopped down on the bed to cry. Then I would get newspapers from other places and write letters to answer the ads. Finally in October I got a job. Winton-Waugh Savings in Waco, Texas, wanted a management trainee. I went to work in the loan department at just about the time when things started heating up. I remember I was making two hundred and seventy-two dollars a week. Pretty soon I started noticing that a lot more money was coming into the bank, and a lot more going out as loans. That was the start."

"What did you do?"

"I went to a party." Her face had an ironic smile, as though she had thought about it so many times that she expected Jane to understand. "The bank had a giant bash for its big customers, and I got introduced to some of them. There were men there who had tens of millions of dollars. And I was with them, talking futures and options with them as if I was one of them. There was one in particular who was really nice. His name was Dan Campbell. Not Daniel. When he signed papers he wrote 'Dan.' He had everything: a big house in Houston, a cattle ranch in Oklahoma, and a plane for flying back and forth. I knew all about them because the loan papers were in a filing cabinet right behind the desk where I sat every day."

"There was this big candlelight dinner on tables set up in the bank lobby, and dancing. I'd never seen so much liquor, all the bottles lined up on this portable bar with the lights behind them so they looked pretty, like perfume bottles or something. When the formal party was over and most of the people went home, the night wasn't over. There was a small private party just for maybe twenty people like Dan Campbell in the executive suites down the hall. We all started in Mr. Waugh's office, but people wandered out into the garden outside the sliding door and into some of the other offices, carrying their drinks. Somehow Dan Campbell and I ended up in my office. After a few minutes he switched off the light and locked the door. A person would have had to be retarded not to have it occur to her that if we didn't make any noise people would never know we were in there."

"You don't have to tell me this."

"Yes, I do," said Mary. Her face was set and insistent. "So then Dan Campbell is saying, 'Come on, Lily. Just touch it. I promise it won't bite.' I was not an innocent young thing. I don't want to give you that impression or imply that I was drunk or something. I wasn't left breathless and swept off my feet by a charming older man. If I was dazzled by anything, it was by being near all that money. Also, I liked him and was impressed with him, so I did it."

"The next day I was back at my desk as usual, feeling a little bit amazed when my eyes would happen to fall on some particular piece of furniture, and then a little depressed and foolish, and in comes a delivery guy with twenty-four long-stemmed red roses in a beautiful crystal vase and puts them on my desk. I see them, and for a second I think maybe I wasn't just this stupid girl who got talked into something. Maybe this was just what I had convinced myself it was for a few minutes last night when I forgot it was the bank that took me to dinner. Then I opened the card, and it was signed by Mr. Waugh, my boss. There was a check for a thousand dollars from the bank that said 'Employee Incentive Bonus.'"

"Did you quit?"

"No," said Mary. "I didn't. I started to, I thought about it, but I didn't do it. You hear a lot about people doing that, but you don't see it much. People say they walked out, threw their jobs away or something, but at least they have their principles. But it's almost never like that. It almost never happens right away, just like you never think of the clever thing to say to somebody when it would have mattered. And I couldn't think of a way to tell Mr. Waugh I resented getting a check for it without coming out and announcing exactly what it was that he and I both knew I had done. I decided I wasn't about to face that conversation, and there was nothing else I could do to change things. All I could do was cash the check and go on with my life."

"The bank was growing then, and pretty soon I'm not working in the loan department, I'm a loan officer. Mr. Waugh tells me we've got to go on a business trip to Houston. I remember the flowers and get all upset, but there just isn't a way to get out of it. By now I understand why the bank needs to move money in and out, and my job is to keep the money going out, and that means meeting with customers. And there were two other women going: Mr. Waugh's assistant and another loan officer.

The pay was getting better and better, and I was learning a lot, so I didn't try to get out of it."

Jane could tell that Mary was not lying now. She was trying to push away the excuses. This was a confession.

"We meet with a group of twelve investors who have formed a limited partnership for a real estate development. You know, right now I can't even remember what they were calling it, but it was the usual thing, something like Sunnydale Vistas or Meadowgrove Heights. Anyway, the first session is in an office they've set up near River Oaks. Not in River Oaks, of course, but close enough so people would smell money on their business cards. Things were really tantalizing in that first session. We've got the chance to lend them sixty million, maybe more later. They're willing to keep it deposited until they need it, with the interest in escrow offsetting our costs - which are nil - and release times tied to what gets built. Then we were supposed to go out and see the land. It was near La Porte, right by Galveston Bay. The plans called for canals, with boat slips for each house, malls, and all that."

"We don't drive, though. We go out to get the best view on this big boat that's leased to the company's sales department for impressing the customers. We see it through binoculars and talk business until dark, but still no papers get signed. We have a catered dinner, and still no agreement comes out of Mr. Waugh's briefcase. It just degenerates into a cocktail party on the upper deck. Everybody's talking about money and their favorite things that it buys and how great they're all doing. They're getting tipsy and optimistic. Pretty soon I start to hear music coming from somewhere down below, and laughing and loud talk. One by one, people start to disappear. It goes on awhile until it's just me and Waugh and maybe three of these investors. It's getting cold up on deck. I say to Waugh, 'Maybe I'll go down below.' He says, 'If you like.' So I make my way down those steps in the dark in high heels carrying a martini."

"The others didn't go down?"

"One did. I had to help him, because he was getting drunk. So I go down and open the door to this big room they called the saloon, and the music is deafening. What I see at that moment makes me drop my drink. It's Waugh's assistant. Her name was Maria. She's dancing, doing a strip for these four investors, and I do not mean a tease. When I came in she was already down to her panties, and she's got her thumbs in the waistband, as though they were about to move south. I start to back out, but the drunk behind me pushes me in, and Maria sees me. She kind of wriggles over to me without losing a beat, puts her arm around me with a big smile, yells into my ear, 'Come on. Get with the party,' and starts pulling me into the saloon with her. I pushed her arm off me and said, 'Stop it. I'm not some hooker.'"

"What happened?"

"She got really angry - shot me a look that would knock a pigeon off a telephone wire - and said, 'Don't kid me, honey. Who do you think made out your last bonus check?' But then there's one of these investors behind her, and he's impatient for the show to go on, and he pulls the panties down to her feet. She grins, steps out of them, kind of sticks out her rear end, gives it a little wriggle, and starts to dance with him. I turn and walk out of the saloon. I don't know where to go. I open the door to one of the staterooms, and there's the other loan officer. She's doing one of the investors on the bed while a couple of others watch. I shut the door, go back up the hallway toward the steps, and there's Mr. Waugh. He opens the door of the saloon so he can glance in, and I can see that Maria has gone way beyond the strip. It's an orgy. He opens the door a little wider, holding it for me to go in first. Then he sees the expression on my face, kind of shrugs, and goes inside. I spend the next four hours alone up on that freezing deck."

"Did he fire you?"

"No. I took a plane back by myself and came in Monday morning to find the loan papers, all signed, on my desk. All of a sudden the account was mine and I had to make the deal work - get it through the loan committee and the lawyers, and set up the schedules, and all that. And I had to make out the bonus checks: ten grand each. Nobody said a word about it. Maria was invisible for weeks. The other loan officer - her name was Kathy - was no friend of mine. She never spoke to me again. I started looking for jobs. The bank was growing out of control by then, so we were all busy enough not to have to look right at each other."

"Nothing else happened?"

"About a month later, I come into work and there are these strange women in the office. Both of them are young - twenty or twenty-one - and gorgeous. Maria comes in with them, and her face is absolutely empty. She says to me, 'We're really running short of space around here. Mr. Waugh wants you to move back out to your old desk to make room for the new loan officers.' Out front was the pool of low-level clerical people and beginners. I cleaned out my office - pictures, plants, and paper clips - carried everything out, and put it all on my old desk, and something happened. I knew they wanted me to quit, and I wanted to quit, but up until then I had also wanted to outlast them, take whatever they had to offer for as long as it took and then end up with a better job somewhere else. I had been operating on the theory that I made them more uncomfortable than they made me. But it was too much. I closed the desk drawer and walked into Mr. Waugh's office. He was on the phone and he said into it, 'Excuse me. I have something I have to take care of. I'll call you right back,' all the time with his eyes on me. He hung up. I said, 'You didn't have to hang up. I just wanted to say goodbye.' I reached over the desk and shook his hand and said, 'Thank you for hiring me.' He was surprised. I thought at first that he was just relieved because it wasn't a horrible scene, but before I was across the lobby I realized that all along he had been expecting me to come around."

"You didn't have another job. Where did you go?"

Mary Perkins gave a sad little laugh. "I went nowhere. I couldn't find another job in town. I couldn't find one anywhere, so I moved to California. Just getting there took about the last of the money I had saved. I was out of work for six months. I was twenty-four, looking better than I ever have in my life because I didn't have enough money to eat regularly. I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for me. The fantasy I had wasn't about getting a nicer place to live and having enough food. It was getting rich - really rich. I had been on the party boats, done the big real estate deals, and flown in the private planes, and I wanted them again. So I thought of how to get them, and I got started."

"How did you get started?"

"I used to spend a lot of time at the unemployment office, and I got used to seeing the regulars. One was a guy who had tried to talk to me. You have to picture this. There's a guy about forty, in there to collect his unemployment check, and he sees a woman who turns him on, so he goes up to her and tells her not to worry. He's a successful contractor, and as soon as spring comes he's going to be doing more big projects and he'll hire her. But he was good-looking and cheerful and, oddly enough, he wasn't stupid, so I decided to get to know him. I went into the unemployment office and smiled at him. When he hit on me, I said, 'Why don't you take me out for coffee?' We walked out to the lot, and he's driving a three-year-old BMW with a brand-new lock on the trunk. I'd had enough experience making loans to know that locks don't wear out in three years. They get drilled out because the original owner didn't hand over the keys. It turns out that even though he's a liar, he really does have a contractor's license, but no capital, no crew, and nothing going for him. He was perfect."

"Perfect for what?"

"I had decided to use what I knew about savings and loans. I promoted him from contractor to developer. I was his wife. We called ourselves the Comstocks or the Staffords or the Stoddards. We would go to a new city where nobody knew us. Sometimes we'd rent a house in a quiet, upscale part of town and do nothing but get to know our neighbors. Eventually there would be somebody who would invite us to his club, or to a summer home, or just to a party. Once we were accepted, the bankers would find us. Sometimes all it took was to let our new friends know we were happy there and wanted to buy a fancy house. By 'eighty-three a lot of savings executives were dying to lend a couple of million to just about anybody who wanted it for something as normal as a house, and they listened for leads."

"What then?"

"It varied. Sometimes we'd get somebody to sell us a hundred-thousand-dollar house for a million, kick back five hundred thousand, and leave town on the same day. The best was when we got to know the savings and loan executive and his wife - saw them socially. I would find a way to get the man alone - happen to go alone to the place where he always ate lunch, or drop in to see his wife on a Saturday afternoon when I knew she would be gone. I would convince him that he was so irresistible that I didn't plan to try. If that worked I would turn it into a full-blown affair and concentrate on making sure he didn't want it to end just yet. Eventually the subject of my husband's real estate development would come up. I would say he was considering moving to another state and doing the project there because the local money people didn't see the potential. Bobby would get his loan. When Bobby didn't make payments, the bank would issue a new loan to cover the interest, or buy into the project. I learned all the tricks that a banker could think of just by watching these guys trying to keep Bobby busy and stupid."

"It always worked?"

Mary Perkins shook her head. "Nothing always works. But I designed it so that if the banker wasn't interested, the worst he could do to me was to tell my husband. But if he once sunk it into me, that option was gone, and he was in for the ride of his life." She stopped and stared at Jane. "You're thinking that I invented a scheme to turn myself into a whore, don't you? To do what I wouldn't do for Mr. Waugh."

Jane shrugged. "I'm not in the habit of making that kind of judgment."

"Well, that's exactly what I did. At one point I was doing both the husband and wife at once, and the three of us were conspiring to keep Bobby too busy to notice by pumping money into his business. Of course I had to keep Bobby happy too. We were living as a married couple, and I couldn't have him going off tomcatting around the country club. This went on for about three years."

"What ended it?"

"I got enough money and enough inside information to do the stunts I told you about. It was essentially the same, except that Bobby had enough to retire, so I let him. I would get the loan myself, and would default on it myself, but first I made sure that Cyrus Curbstone had seen enough of me so that he didn't want my loan brought to the police."

"How did you get caught?"

"I bought a savings and loan," Mary said. "Big mistake. I thought I knew more than I did. I didn't know when to set fire to the place and get on a plane."

"Why are you telling me all this now?"

"I want you to know," Mary said.

"Know what?"

"Why I held on to the money when I was caught and the feds wanted it back. Why I told you I didn't have it when I needed your help and any sane person would have given it up to stay alive. It wasn't because I needed to have a lot of money hidden someplace where I'll probably never see it again; it's because of what I had to do to get it."

"But why now?"

"Because now that I know enough to want to give it up, I can't give it up. He wouldn't take it and let me go, would he?"

"No."

"He would take it and insist there was more, and when I couldn't give him any more, all he could do was kill me."

"Yes."

"And he'll never give up, will he?"

"No," said Jane. "He won't."

"And if I go to the police and tell them he's been chasing me, what I'm telling them is that he might be trying to steal fifty million dollars. That's no crime, but I'm admitting that I still have it. I'm the only one who will go to jail, and he'll still be free to kill me."

"Fifty million dollars." Jane returned to taping her cards into the lining of her purse. "You'll make good bait."

"Yes," Mary said, "I will."

22

When Jane and Mary left Cleveland they were carrying suitcases that were much larger than they needed to hold the few outfits they had bought, because they had more shopping to do in Chicago. The first item they selected at the electronics store was a small video camera with automatic focus and a zoom lens. The second was a directional microphone. The brochure that went with the microphone described the wonderful capability it offered for recording bird songs without coming close enough to disturb the little creatures. The copy obviously had been composed in order to protect the company from becoming a co-defendant in some criminal proceeding. Jane tested a number of voice-activated tape recorders, and when she had settled on the best, she told the salesman to write up a bill for two.

While he was busy doing this, Mary whispered, "Why two?"

Jane answered, "Because I don't think having a conversation with Barraclough is something I'll want to try twice if the first recorder doesn't catch every word."

Jane bought a used Toyota in Chicago under the name Catherine Snowdon. It was five years old, had one previous owner who had kept it greased, oiled, and maintained, but it had a sporty red exterior. She drove it off the lot to a one-day spray shop and had it painted gray for five hundred dollars. Then she picked up Mary at the motel and turned west onto Route 80. It was winter now, and if they were going to travel by road, it had to be a big one.

For six days they drove the interstate through Davenport, Des Moines, Omaha, Grand Island, North Platte, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City. Just before Reno they turned south down 395 along the east side of the Sierras to the desert. Jane checked them into a motel in San Bernardino near the entrance to I-10, rested for a day, and studied the maps of Los Angeles County. The next day she drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles, reported the sale of Catherine Snowdon's car to Katherine Webster, a resident of Los Angeles, and picked up a set of California plates.

She spent two days driving the freeways until she found the spot she wanted, right on the western edge of a confusing knot of interlocking entrances, exits, and overpasses on the Ventura Freeway. If a person drove east, he would immediately come to the fork where half the lanes swung off onto the San Diego Freeway, then divided again to go north toward Sacramento or south toward San Diego. After another mile or two, there was another junction where some lanes went north on the Hollywood Freeway but most swung southeast toward the city. Another mile and there was another fork, with some lanes continuing southeast and the others bearing due east toward Glendale and Pasadena. With a small head start, a car heading eastward could be very hard to follow.

Every mile on the Ventura Freeway there was a little yellow pole with an emergency telephone on it. The small blue marker above the pole Jane chose announced that it was number 177.

That night in the motel Jane tested the equipment. At two a.m. she drove back into the San Fernando Valley. She parked the car on a quiet side street in Sherman Oaks just north of Riverside Drive and walked the rest of the way to the little hill that elevated the Ventura Freeway above the surrounding neighborhoods. She had to lower the equipment over a fence and then climb over after it.

She was hidden from the street by thick bushes, and from the freeway by a low metal barrier along the shoulder. The barrier was supposed to keep a runaway car on the eastbound side of the Ventura Freeway from careening down the hill into the front of somebody's house, and judging by the depth of some of the dents and scrapes, it probably had. She trained the directional microphone carefully across the freeway on a spot twenty feet from call box number 177, then adjusted the breadth of its field until it picked up very little street noise. She threw a stone at the spot and watched the reels of the two tape recorders turn when it hit, then stop again. She set the video camera on automatic focus and aimed it at the same spot. She switched everything off, carefully covered all of the equipment with leaves and branches, then went down the hill, over the fence, and back to her car.

Jane and Mary stayed at the motel for two more days. They rehearsed, memorized, and analyzed until it began to seem as though everything Jane was planning had already happened and they were weeks past it already, trying to recall the details.

"How long do you stay?" asked Jane.

"Ten seconds. Fifteen at the most. Just long enough to pop out the tapes."

"What happens if he pulls out a gun?" Jane asked.

"I leave."

"What if he puts it to my head?"

"I ignore it. There's nothing I can do to stop him, so I leave."

Early each morning they drove along the Ventura Freeway past call box 177, studying the flow of the traffic for ten miles in both directions. They memorized the fastest lanes, practiced making an exit just beyond the junction with another freeway and then coming up a side street to emerge on the new freeway going in another direction.

"Can't you just call him up and record what he says on the phone?" asked Mary.

"No," said Jane. "He's the regional head of a big security company. His phone will have sweepers and bug detectors that even the police can't buy yet. Besides, he won't say anything that will put him away unless he sees you."

On the third day at four in the afternoon Jane White-field went to a pay telephone in Barstow and made the call. "I want to speak with Mr. Barraclough," she said. "Tell him it's Colleen Mahoney from the courthouse. I have something he wants to talk about."

"Can you hold?" said the secretary.

"No," said Jane. "I'll call back in two minutes. Tell him if he's not the one who answers, he's lost it." She waited four minutes, then dialed the number again.

This time a man's voice answered. It was deep, as though it came from a big body, but it was smooth, clear, and untroubled. "Yes?" he said.

"Is this Mr. Barraclough?"

"Yes, it is." He held the last word so it was almost singsong.

"This is - "

"I know who it is, Jane," he said. "I heard that's what you like to be called. What can I do for you?"

Her mind stumbled, then raced to catch up. He was far ahead of the place where she had thought he would be. "I have Mary Perkins," she said.

"Who's Mary Perkins?"

"I'm not recording this," she said. "Your phone isn't tapped."

"I know it isn't."

"Then do you want her?"

"If you have her, why do you need me? You like me all of a sudden?"

"If you weren't tracing this call, why would you ask so many stupid questions?" Jane asked. "I'll call this number at five a.m. tomorrow. If you meet me alone and unarmed, you'll get a peek." She hung up, picked up Mary, and drove to Los Angeles, where they rented two identical white cars, then left the gray Toyota at the Burbank Airport. They spent the night in a motel in Woodland Hills.

At four a.m. Jane parked her rented car on the street she had chosen below the freeway, climbed the fence to turn on her camera, microphone, and recorders. Then she drove west to the big coffee shop in Agoura and at exactly five a.m. used the pay telephone outside the door.

"Yes?" said Barraclough.

"It's me," she said. "In twenty minutes I'll be at the lot on the corner of Woodley Avenue and Burbank Boulevard in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. If you're not there I'll keep going."

"Wait," he said. "I didn't get those streets."

"Then rewind the tape and play it back," she said, and hung up.

Twenty minutes was an enormous stretch of time for a man like Barraclough. Jane thought about all of the preparations he would have made already. He would have all of the trainees on the special payroll of Enterprise Development already awake and standing by. He would have some pretext for using Intercontinental Security's facilities and equipment too. Now he would be frantically ordering all of them into positions around the Sepulveda Recreation Area. No, not frantically: coldly, methodically.

She had selected the meeting place carefully. It was the sort of spot a person might choose who had some fear of ambush but no understanding of how such things happened. It was free of people in the hours before dawn, a flat open lawn that had been built as a flood basin with a vast empty sod farm on one side, a golf course on the other, and nothing much but picnic tables and a baseball diamond in between. The place gave the illusion of safety because she could see a second car coming from half a mile off. So could he, but all he had to do was block two spots on Burbank Boulevard and one end of Woodley and she was trapped.

Jane left the Ventura Freeway and continued eastward on Burbank Boulevard. It would still be another hour before the sun came up. At exactly 5:20 she was driving beside the golf course, and as she came around the long curve, she saw his car. It was a new, dark gray Chevrolet parked beside the road on the small gravel plateau above the empty reservoir. She could see the little stream of exhaust from the tailpipe that showed her the car was running. She took her foot off the gas pedal as she approached, and coasted to a speed of under ten miles an hour. She made a left turn onto the lot, then pulled up ten feet away from his car and stared into the side window.

It was difficult to tell how tall he was when he was seated in the car, but he gave her the impression of being big. His hands on the wheel were thick and square-knuckled, and his shoulders were much wider than the steering wheel. The white pinstriped shirt he had on seemed a little tight on his upper arms, the way cops wore theirs. He was obviously wearing it without a coat to make her believe he had actually come unarmed.

She looked directly into his face. The corners of his mouth were turned up in a wry half smile. She reminded herself that she had known he would try to rattle her with some intimidating expression, maybe the poker player's look when he raised his bet: my money's on the table, so let's see yours. But his face set off a little burst of heat in her chest that rose up her throat into her jaw muscles. She could not turn away from the eyes. They were light, almost gray, squinting a little because of the false smile, and watching her with a disconcerting intensity. They took in her fear and discomfort, added his savoring of it, and reflected it back to her. His mind was focused utterly on her, on what she was feeling and thinking. His eyes revealed that he felt nothing except some vicarious glow from the anxiety he could inspire in her.

It was time to lose whoever he had brought with him. Jane stamped her foot on the gas pedal and the car's back wheels spun, kicking up gravel. It fishtailed a little as one wheel caught before the other and then it squealed out of the lot onto Burbank Boulevard. She drove to the east, took the ramp onto the San Diego Freeway at forty, and sailed into the right lane at sixty-five. She checked her rearview mirror to be sure he was coming, and saw the gray Chevrolet skid around the curve and shoot off the ramp toward her. She kept adding increments of speed while she held the car steady in the center lane.

She watched the mirror so she could spot his helpers coming up to join him, but no other car on the freeway was traveling as fast as theirs were. She checked the cars ahead, but none of them did anything out of the ordinary either. She waited until the last second to cut back across the right lane to the feeder for the Ventura Freeway, then stayed in the eastbound lane until it was almost too late before she cut across the painted lines to the westbound ramp. She looked into the mirror again, not to confirm that he was still chasing her but to be sure that no other car could have followed him.

She drove westward until she saw the telephone with the blue "177" painted above it, then turned on her emergency flashers and coasted along until she made it to the shoulder and stopped twenty feet past the call box. She got out of her car and walked to the spot where she had aimed her directional microphone and camera. She saw his headlights after five seconds, then the turn signal, and in a moment he was rolling up along the shoulder of the road to stop behind her.

He swung his door open on the traffic side, got out as though he were invulnerable to getting clipped, and walked up to her. His arms were out from his sides, but he was carrying something in his hand. She stepped backward to the door of her car. He saw her move and seemed to understand that she was preparing to bolt. He set the object on the ground and stepped back.

Jane kept her eyes on him as she stepped forward and picked it up. It was a small box with a metal hoop and a thumb switch. She recognized that it was a hand-held metal detector like the ones they used in airports when somebody set off the walk-through model. She ran it over herself from head to foot, then tossed it to him and he did the same, turning around so she could see there was nothing stuck in his belt. The little box didn't beep.

Barraclough's eyes scanned the area around him in every direction, returning to her face abruptly now and then to see if she reacted. He said, "Mind if I look in your car?"

"Go ahead," she said. "Mind if I look in yours?"

The mysterious smile returned. "No." He watched her as he took a step toward her rented car. She never moved. He said, "You driving or am I?"

She said, "I'm not getting into a car with you."

He looked around him again, as though this meant he needed to do a better job of searching the middle distance for witnesses. He said, "What made you panic back there?"

"That's not what I want to talk about. I say it was a trap, you say it wasn't, I say you're a liar."

His smile seemed to grow a little. "What do you want to talk about?"

"You've been chasing Mary Perkins, I've been hiding her. Now I'm ready to sell her."

He squinted a little as he studied her face. "Why?"

She returned his stare. "I've been at this a long time. A lot of people would be dead without me."

"I've heard that," said Barraclough. "Sometime I'll get you to give me a list."

"No, you won't," she said simply. "Mary Perkins isn't the sort of person I want to risk my life for. She's not worth it. I gave her a chance and she disappointed me. I know that she's got a lot of money. You seem to think you can get it. I'm not interested in that kind of work."

Barraclough tilted his head a little to watch her closely. "You know what will happen when I have her?"

"You'll end up with her money. I also know that if you have her she's not coming back to ask me how it happened."

"That's true," he said.

She took a deep breath and blew it out. She had done it. He had agreed on tape that he was going to take the money and kill her. "This is a one-day sale," she said. "Tomorrow she goes up for auction. You want her or not?"

"I want her."

"The price is three million in cash. You hand it over and I give her up three weeks later. I know you'll mark it, so I need time to pass it on before you start tracing."

A laugh escaped him abruptly, as though a small child had surprised him by saying something unintentionally profound. "Done," he said. "Of course, that's assuming I get to see her in person so I know you can deliver."

"You can," said Jane. "She'll be along any minute."

"Here?" he said. She could see his mind working. He wanted to get back to his car to retrieve the weapon he had hidden, but he had not yet thought of a way to do it without Jane's noticing.

"There," said Jane. She pointed across the ten lanes of the freeway at the white car just like hers gliding onto the shoulder on the eastbound side. "That's her now." Mary Perkins's car rolled to a stop just at the spot Jane had shown her. "She'll get out of the car so you can see her. Then she'll pick up something I left for her in the bushes over there. She thinks you're a wholesaler who sells me stolen credit cards and licenses." Jane watched Barraclough's hands. "You're not trustworthy, so I can't pay you until she has them." Mary got out of the car and stepped over the barrier into the bushes.

Jane let her eyes flick up to Barraclough's face. "Well?"

"Hard to tell," he said. "She's so far away."

"Nice try," she said. "I saw you start to drool the second she opened the door. You get one more peek."

Mary Perkins came back out of the bushes. Jane could see the bulge of the tapes from the video camera and the recorders in her purse. Mary nodded and Jane stepped away from Barraclough, closer to her car. Now was the time when it would occur to him to hold her.

Barraclough was smiling again. His arm straightened and he waved happily at Mary Perkins.

"What are you doing?" Jane snapped.

He turned to face her, but his arms were poised in front of him. He looked like a fisherman about to make a grab for a hooked fish. "Just waving to the lady. We don't want her to think I'm not a friendly wholesaler."

Jane's body tensed, not certain whether to run for the car or attack him. He was signaling someone, and it wasn't Mary. What had she missed? She jerked her head to the left to look back up the freeway - and saw the man Barraclough must have been waving to. He stepped out of the bushes and ran back along the shoulder just at the entrance ramp. In another two steps he disappeared around the curve.

He must be getting into another car that had been idling out of sight beside the entrance ramp. Now she saw its lights come onto the freeway and they seemed to jerk upward into the sky before they swung around and leveled on the pavement ahead of it. The car accelerated toward Jane and Barraclough, its right tires already on the shoulder as though it were going to obliterate them.

Jane waved her arm at Mary. "Go!" she shouted.

Mary seemed to be transfixed by the sudden arrival of an unexpected car. She stared across the ten lanes of the freeway and watched the red car rushing up the westbound side toward Jane, knowing it was time for her to leave, but not knowing how.

Jane screamed. "Go! Go! It's a trap!" She started backing toward her parked car, the adrenaline making her legs push too hard so she half walked and half danced, trying to watch the car bearing down on her and Mary and Barraclough at the same time.

Mary dropped her keys, bobbed down to pick them up, then got into her car. Jane took one more look at Barraclough and hurried to the door of her own car.

The headlights of the car Barraclough had summoned dipped down as it decelerated suddenly, moved past Barraclough, and then pulled over. As it slowly moved up behind Janes car, her heart began to pound. Its headlights went out, the driver's door opened an inch, and the dome light came on. The one in the passenger seat was Timothy Phillips.

Barraclough opened the other door, pulled the little boy out onto the shoulder of the freeway and yelled, "Hey, Jane! How about a trade? Is he worth it?"

These were the first words loud enough for Mary to hear across the freeway. She started the engine and shifted to Drive, but her eyes were on the activity going on across the freeway. The little boy must be the one Jane had told her about. Who else could he be? He was scared, straining to get closer to Jane Whitefield, but the big man in the white shirt had a grip on his thin arm and it was hurting him. Anybody could see it was hurting him. Headlights settled on them, grew brighter and brighter, and then flashed past. Were those drivers blind? Couldn't they see that something horrible was happening?

The knowledge slowly settled on Mary that none of the drivers knew who the big man was, and you had to know that. They probably thought he was a father who was afraid his son might stray too close to the lane where their cars were speeding past. There was only one person here who had any idea of what she was looking at.

Mary turned off the engine, got out of the car, and stood on the shoulder of the road. She could see Jane ten lanes away, caught for a second in the headlights of a speeding car, staring back at Mary, her mouth wide open and her arm in motion, waving her back into the car. Her voice reached Mary faintly across all the lanes, but whatever it was saying was only a distraction.

Mary was concentrating, so there was no room for Jane's voice. She waited for a moment while a truck barreled past and the hot, sulfurous wind from its passing tore at her clothes and stung her face. Then she stepped onto the hard pavement of the freeway. She walked at a normal pace. She never stopped to wait on the dotted line between two lanes, because anything that was not in motion might blend in. It would take only a second of blindness for a driver going sixty miles an hour to travel eighty-eight feet and kill her. She made it across five lanes to the middle island and rested her fear for a moment inside the barrier before she could face walking across another five lanes.

Now Jane was much closer, and Mary could see the anguish on her face. "Run! Go back!" Jane shouted. Mary was disappointed. Jane simply didn't understand.

Mary looked across the last five lanes at Barraclough. They stared into each other's eyes, and she could see that he understood. He pushed the little boy back into the red car that had brought him, then ran back along the edge of the freeway and got into his big gray car.

Mary Perkins's eyes never left Barraclough after that. She could see him glancing in his rearview mirror as he pulled out into the traffic, then crossed over one lane, then another, then another. He had already gone far past her, but she walked in his direction patiently, watching him take the last two lanes and stop far ahead of her on the center island where she walked. Then she saw his back-up lights come on, and he began to move in reverse on the center margin to meet her. She had never seen anybody drive backward so fast. Oh, yes, he had once been a policeman. They all learned how to do things like backing up on freeway shoulders.

Timothy Phillips looked out the window of the red car and watched Jane staring in horror at the other lady. But as the man who had brought him here started the car, Timmy saw Jane's right hand move down beside her leg and beckon to him.

Timmy got the passenger door of the red car half open before the driver lunged across the seat and clutched his shirt to drag him back. The sudden movement was enough. Jane flung the driver's door open, delivered a hard jab to his kidney, and snatched the key out of the ignition.

The driver turned with a pained snarl and started out the door after her. Jane retreated toward the front of the car. The driver heard the boy opening the door behind him again just as his foot touched the ground. He yelled, "Stay there or I'll kill you," but half turning his head to say it made him a microsecond slower. Jane had time to take a running step and deliver a hard kick to the driver's door.

The door caught the driver's leg just above the ankle. He winced at the pain, pivoted with his hip against the door to keep it from coming back at him, and rolled out onto the ground. He scrambled toward the rear of the car to lure Jane into an attack. All he had to do was get his hands on any part of her and swing her onto the freeway.

As she advanced a step, he did his best to look as though he were hurt and vulnerable. He got her to take three quick steps toward him while he hobbled backward, preparing to grasp her and roll back to add momentum as he propelled her into traffic. Jane took one more step, slipped into the car, slammed the door, and hammered down the lock buttons.

The man heard the engine start as he dashed toward her. Just as his fingers brushed the door handle, the rear wheels spun, bits of loose gravel shot out behind, and he had to step back to keep from being dragged out into the traffic as the car shot past him.

23

"Fasten your seat belt, Timmy, and don't be scared," I said Jane. She drove as fast as she dared, threading her way between slower vehicles and accelerating into the clear stretches. Even half an hour before sunrise there were beginning to be places where knots of cars jammed all the lanes at once. She turned off the freeway at White-oak, then shot under the overpass and up the eastbound ramp. The traffic was heavier heading into the center of the city. She had intended this as an advantage for Mary, because the slow, close-spaced stream would make it hard for even a superior driver to catch up with her. Now Jane was fighting the inertia herself.

She glanced down at the dashboard. The gas tank was full. Of course it would be. The car didn't seem to have a radio, but there was a black box about the size of one mounted in front of the shifter on the hump for the drive-shaft. "Tell me what happened," she said. "How you got here."

Timmy shrugged. "They brought some of my stuff. You know, from the apartment where Mona and I lived in Chicago. There were things they wanted me to identify that belonged to Mona. Then there was another box with some of my clothes and things. The next day I tried to put on my good shoes, but I couldn't get one of them on because your note was crumpled up in the toe."

"My note?" Once again Barraclough had been thinking faster than she had. Timmy's location had been kept secret, but the Chicago apartment had not. Barraclough had known that the F.B.I, or the Chicago police would search it. Because he had been a cop, he had also known that after they had preserved and labeled everything that could be considered evidence, there would be a lot left. They would release some of Timmy's belongings. Barraclough had even known that if nothing else got to Timmy, his best shoes would. He was going to have to look presentable in court.

"Yeah. So I called the phone number on your note, and the lady told me you weren't home but to call again when I could. And she asked me what the address was. I thought that was kind of odd, but she said you forgot to tell her. So last night when I called, she told me you wanted me to meet you."

Jane held herself in check. It wasn't Timmy's fault. For over two years he had been surviving by following whatever incomprehensible directions some adult - Morgan or Mona or Jane - had given him. "What else did she tell you?'"

"That you told her if I could make it to the door by the garden, I could crawl along between the bushes and the house and slip right through the hedge to the next yard without anybody seeing me. You were right about all of it. Nobody saw me go. Then I walked over two streets, found this car right where she said it would be, climbed in the back seat, and lay down to wait. After a long time that man got in and we drove off. He said we were going to meet you."

Jane groped under the seat and beneath the dashboard, and then realized it was a waste of time. If there had been a gun in the car it couldn't be anyplace where the driver could have reached it or she and Timmy would be dead. Barraclough had made sure the assignment had stayed specific. Probably what he had feared most was not that Jane would see a gun and call the meeting off. He would be more afraid that his court-certified violence-prone trainee would show his initiative by using a gun where Mary might get hit.

She studied the inside of the car. "Did you see the driver use this black box?"

"Oh, yeah," said Timmy. "He said it was how he knew where we were going to meet you. See?" He pointed at a dial on the top that looked like the face of a compass. Jane was on a long, straight stretch of freeway, and she could see the needle was moving.

"Timmy," said Jane. "I didn't send the note. If I ever come for you again, I won't send a note or make a telephone call either. I'll make sure you see me. Don't go to some woman with dark hair who waves from a hundred feet away. I'll be up close, so you can tell."

He looked alarmed. "You're taking me back?"

"I can't drive you to a policeman's house in a stolen car," said Jane. "I'll have to drop you off in a safe place."

Jane leaned forward a little to glance at the black box. The needle was moving again. They had swung around to the east, just as she had. She had only the vaguest idea how direction finders worked. There was some kind of transmitter in Barraclough's car, and the black box received the signal and pointed out the direction it was coming from. But what could the range possibly be? A mile? Five miles? As though the machine had read her thoughts, the needle wavered, then swung to a straight vertical position and stayed there. It had already lost touch with Barraclough.

Jane maneuvered through the crush of vehicles. At any minute Barraclough or one of his lieutenants would know that she had the car, and they would take the necessary steps to find it. Probably they would report it stolen and let the police catch her for them. She had only one way to avoid the police. She drove to the parking structure at the Burbank airport.

She parked beside the gray Toyota and took the car keys from under the bumper. For a moment she considered ripping the black box out of the red car and trying to install it in her own car. But by now Barraclough certainly knew she had it. If she got the direction finder to work, eventually she would find that it was following a transmitter Barraclough had placed where she could be ambushed. She ushered Timmy into the gray Toyota and drove out of the parking ramp.

Ten minutes later Jane dialed a pay telephone and listened to Judge Kramer's voice. "Hello?"

She said, "Judge, it's me. Do you know for sure that your phone is not tapped?"

"I have it swept every day. No bugs so far. What's going on? How did you get this number?"

"Listen carefully. I'm with Timmy. They found him and lured him out. They know I've got him back and they're about to start looking for us, if they aren't already. I'm leaving him in the waiting area of the emergency room at Saint Joseph's Hospital in Burbank. He's faking a stomachache, so they'll have to keep him at least long enough for a doctor to be sure it's not his appendix.

The guard inside thinks I'm calling his father to say we got here. Say that's who you are when you come for him."

"But what - "

"He'll tell you. Bye." She hung up and looked in through the glass doors of the emergency room at Timmy for a heartbeat, then hurried to her car.

As Jane got back on the freeway she had to struggle against the feeling that Barraclough was simply too smart for her. Every time she tried anything, he seemed to have anticipated it and brought it back to bear on her. She pulled off the freeway and made her way to the quiet side street in Sherman Oaks. She climbed the fence with a growing dread. She made her way up the little hill and crouched beside the freeway. The rented car was still where Mary had left it, and across the freeway she could see hers too. She moved to Mary's car, looked in the windows, then under the seats and mats and in the glove compartment. Barraclough had won again. When he had produced Timmy, Mary had gone to him with the tapes still in her purse.

Jane forced herself to move. She slipped away from the freeway, leaving the camera, microphone, and recorders in the brush. She climbed the fence and drove out to Riverside Drive. Everything depended on her ability to use time efficiently now.

She glanced at her watch. It was six-thirty a.m. and the sun glinted on the windows ahead as she drove west. She tried to think of all of the facts that carried with them some bit of hope. Timmy was alive. Barraclough would never have kidnapped him if he had not expected the driver to take him somewhere and kill him quietly as soon as Barraclough had Mary. Mary was also alive, and would stay alive as long as she was able to keep from giving Barraclough the last dime she had stolen. This thought led Jane in a direction she did not want to go, so she forced herself away from it. Even the black box might help. If Barraclough thought Jane had it, he would try to use it to trap her. This would take some of his time and attention, and anything that accomplished that would help to neutralize the enormous advantage he had.

Jane had an advantage too, and she began to concentrate on it. There was no way that Barraclough could know that the young man she had met in the housing project had told her about Enterprise Development. He had said 5122 Van Nuys Boulevard. She turned right on Van Nuys Boulevard and watched for the building.

When it came up on her right, she could see the car Barraclough had been driving. It was parked on the street near the side door of the small, four-story building. Jane took a breath and felt the air keep coming and coming, expanding in her chest with a feeling of joy. Maybe Barraclough had finally done something foolish. She had assumed he would take Mary to a safe house somewhere. Maybe he had gotten overconfident and stopped at Van Nuys Boulevard to direct the search for Jane. Maybe the driver of the red car had not been heard from yet and Barraclough assumed she and Timmy were dead. Even as she formulated the idea she knew it was impossible. Barraclough had stopped here just long enough to change cars. She pulled her car around the corner out of sight, then went across the street into a coffee shop.

She waited in the coffee shop and watched Enterprise Development for half an hour before a man came out the door of the building. She checked her watch. It was exactly eight. Something prearranged was going on. The chance that someone would happen to emerge from the building on the stroke of the hour was exactly fifty-nine to one against. As the man approached Barraclough's car she studied his wiry gray hair, the razorsharp crease of his pants, the cocky toe-out walk and impeccably shined shoes.

He must be Farrell, the one who called himself the training officer at Intercontinental but who ran the undercover operation out of this building. He took a set of keys out of his pocket, pretended to look down to select the right one while his eyes scanned the block, then got in and drove off. Jane was confused for an instant. Of all the people Barraclough had working for him, Farrell was the only one she had been sure would not be here. He would be where Mary was.

Jane made up her mind quickly, hurried to her car, and drove after him. She had gone only a couple of blocks before she noticed the second car. It was black and nondescript, with one man in it. She turned off Van Nuys Boulevard, then left up the parallel street and watched her mirror, but he didn't follow. She pulled back onto Van Nuys Boulevard two blocks behind him. When Farrell turned right on Victory Boulevard and he followed, she realized that the black car had not been following her; it was following Farrell.

After the turn Jane pulled a little closer to the black car. Even if he was the star graduate of the police auto-surveillance team he couldn't follow a car ahead of him and watch his own back at the same time.

Then Farrell's gray car reached its destination. Jane watched the second car pull to the curb ten feet from the entrance. She drove another two blocks before she parked and watched them in her rearview mirror. Farrell was returning Barraclough's gray car to the agency from which it had been rented. A few minutes later he emerged from the little building, walked out to the street, and got into the black car with the other man. Jane drove around a block to come out behind them on Van Nuys Boulevard. They continued south only as far as the Enterprise Development building and turned in at the parking lot.

Even as Jane winced with frustration and disappointment, she knew she had been right. Farrell was the one Barraclough trusted to manage his separate under-the-surface operation. He was the one to select and recruit young thugs, deliver pep talks, and give them the skills to do his hunting. He was the one who talked about potential, initiative, motivation, and all the nonsense that made them think that whatever qualities they had gone to jail for were now going to make them rich. He was the specialist in the psychology of brutality. He would be the one person Barraclough was sure to want with him for the interrogation of Mary Perkins.

24

Mary sat on the bare, ridged, metal floor of a van. The bumps of the pavement were regular, and she was beginning to get used to them now. Her spine was jarred by the ba-bump as the front wheels, then the back, went over each crack, then paused and went ba-bump again. She had felt a moment of relief when they had dragged her out of the car, but before she had taken a step under her own power they had pushed her into the back of the van and put the bag over her head. It was a burlap sack that had been sprayed with several coats of black paint so she couldn't see through it. The bag went over her head and down her arms to her elbows, and then unseen hands cinched it at the neck. It looked like the black hoods convicts wore in old photographs of hangings - no holes for the eyes or nose, just a gap at the mouth for breathing.

Her heart had stutter-started when she saw it, and then just when she had begun to sense that it wasn't what it looked like, she had felt them pulling her wrists together behind her. This made her remember the article in the magazine about doing anything you could before you got into the car, because afterward it was too late. She had struggled then to save the use of her hands, but she knew she had already missed her best chance to accomplish an escape. She resisted only because her fear was jumping around inside her and making her body move. With the black-painted hood over her head, any one of the three men could have tied her hands while the others went away.

The van was white. She had seen that much before the hood went on. For some time thereafter, while the white van turned sharply a couple of times to topple her over onto the floor, then gathered speed, she wondered why she was no longer afraid. It took her more than an hour in the solitude and darkness of the black-painted hood to detect that it was because none of this was happening to her.

The distinction was a delicate, slippery one that had to be grasped carefully and not squeezed too hard. She was here feeling movement and hearing activity, but even before they had put the hood on, the sights had been distant and the sounds hollow. This didn't feel real. She had been afraid this was going to happen for such a long time that she knew the way it should have felt. It wasn't happening to her; it must be happening to someone else.

The van turned off the big road with the regular cracks on it and went more slowly. Now and then there would be a sharper bump, maybe a pothole, and the hard floor of the van would abruptly jolt her. It was not the bumps that bothered her; it was the fact that the van was moving more slowly, the way people drove when a trip was nearly over.

For the first time she became conscious of everything about the hood over her head. It was hot and rough, and the petroleum smell of the black paint was nauseating. She could feel an itch on the side of her cheek, but her hands were fettered behind her. She tried rubbing the side of her face against the metal strut beside her, but the fabric was so rough and prickly that it seemed to spread the itch from her hairline to her chin. Then the van hit another pothole and the jolt knocked the strut hard against her cheekbone. She let out a little cry and felt tears welling in her eyes.

She hoped the men had not heard it. She knew they had, so they must be aware of her weakness now, staring at her with critical, unpitying eyes while her hope deteriorated into a bitter wish that she had not been so stupid. The physical pain in her cheek kept insisting that she examine it, so she stopped resisting. She allowed herself to contemplate it and to wait for it each time her heart beat and then experience the throb. It was a small pain, only one of the bumps that the body was made to take, but it brought her bad news: this wasn't happening to somebody else. It was happening to her. She had filed somewhere in the back of her mind the information that a person in this situation might have to face some physical violence. Now she could not ignore what her common sense told her: that the pain was not going to be incidental, but was the whole purpose of this trip. They were taking her someplace to hurt her profoundly. It wasn't going to be her standing outside of herself and watching the tall man slapping her once across the face so she didn't really feel it. She was in a kind of trouble that made her heart release a flow of heat that went up her throat and got trapped under the hood with her so that it felt as though her head were in an oven. She could barely breathe, gasping in air through her mouth and tightening her neck and shoulders to bring the small mouth hole they had cut in the hood closer. The hood was wet now from the humidity of her breath, but this didn't seem important.

Every sensation was uncomfortable and unpleasant, and her mind couldn't choose only one to think about.

The van turned and tipped her against the wall again, but she didn't dwell on that either. She was consumed by the fear of the pain that was to come.

As Jane watched the office building on Van Nuys Boulevard she searched her mind for other ways to get Mary back. It was mid-morning already, and there had been no further sign of Farrell. She longed to call the police and get them to find Barraclough. The reasons she couldn't do so flooded into her mind. Barraclough would take time to find even if the police did everything right, and usually they didn't. Even then there was no way they could do anything without talking to somebody who worked for Intercontinental or showing up at one of their offices. If Barraclough had a few minutes of advance warning, Mary would disappear forever.

Barraclough would be taking Mary to a safe house somewhere. The property would probably be a place Barraclough owned, but there would be no way to use his name to find it. He had been in the business of kidnapping people for some time now, so his routine would be practiced and efficient, field-tested and refined. The only reasonable way of finding the place where Mary was being held was to get Farrell to lead her there. That was not going to be simple. She thought of trying to find another Intercontinental car with a direction finder installed in it. But this meant figuring out what car Farrell would drive to the safe house, hiding a transponder inside it, and teaching herself how to operate the receiver. Then she would be stuck behind the wheel of a stolen car, probably for some distance. It wasn't a plan; it was a fantasy.

Any preparation she tried to make now would involve taking her eyes off Farrell's door for at least an hour, and in that time he could have a sixty-mile head start in any direction. She would just have to keep him in sight for as long as it took and hope that he would lead her to Mary.

She kept her car parked a block away and around the corner, out of sight of the windows of Enterprise Development. She watched the building, first from the diner across the street, then from the inside of a bookstore two doors away. After she had leafed through every book near the front window twice, she walked to the thrift store across the street and picked over the used clothes. She chose two hats, a tan jacket, a black sweatshirt, and a pair of sunglasses. She put them on the floor of her car and went to eat dinner at the hamburger franchise on the far corner, where she still had a good view of Enterprise Development.

She knew that every thought she had, every movement she made that wasn't directed toward Farrell was a waste and a danger, but she couldn't keep Mary in the back of her mind where she should be. Each time she thought she had her mind focused on Farrell, a few seconds would tick away and the mere passing of time would remind her. A lot could happen to a person like Mary in thirty seconds, enough horror to last an eternity.

Each hour passed so slowly that she couldn't remember what she might have been thinking or doing before the last one, and the meeting on the freeway seemed to have happened weeks ago. She had stared at the office doors and windows for twelve hours, and still Farrell had not emerged.

Something must have happened that she had missed. At ten p.m. she began to prepare herself to enter the building. He might have walked out the door while she was in the ladies' room of the diner hours ago and gotten into a car that someone had brought to the curb for him. That could be why none of the cars parked near the building had been gone when she returned to the window. Maybe she had seen him go. He could have changed clothes with one of his trainees - something simple and rudimentary like that - and fooled her. He had spent his life perfecting the skills of searching and following, and there was no reason to imagine he had not seen all the ways of hiding and deceiving.

This was the other thought that she couldn't seem to get out of her mind. The reason Barraclough had Mary was that he had known what she would do and Jane had not. No, it was even worse. Mary had never met Timmy. He couldn't have known that she would walk into a fire for him. What Barraclough had known was how Jane would react. He had known that she would have to choose one of them, and the one she would choose was the one he had no further use for, the one he could kill.

She dumped her unfinished food and wrappers into the trash can by the door, slid her tray onto the stack, and walked across the parking lot toward the dark stretch of the street where she could cross without coming under any lights. She could hear footsteps on the sidewalk behind her as she stepped into the street, but she had to use this chance to see the building from a new angle, so she ignored them for the moment. She looked up at the building as she crossed, and through the window she saw Farrell. He was sitting behind his desk talking on the telephone. She reached the sidewalk on the other side of the street, stopped walking, and felt her calm return for a second before she remembered the footsteps.

Maybe the footsteps had been behind her when she came out of the restaurant and she had been so distracted that she simply had not heard them. She began to walk and listened carefully; there were three sets of shoes. She felt as though she had put her foot on a step and it had fallen through. She had been so busy watching the office that it had not occurred to her mat Farrell might have a few trainees on the streets outside. She walked along more quickly until she could use the darkened window of a store to get a look at their reflection. The three didn't fit the pattern at all. One of them wore a baseball cap backward and all three wore baggy pants and oversized jackets. They looked about seventeen or eighteen years old, and not seasoned or desperate enough for Farrell.

She had told Carey she had been mugged in Los Angeles, and now here she was, being considered and evaluated for a mugging in Los Angeles. It was simply out of the question tonight. It was not going to happen.

She took a moment to collect her thoughts, then suddenly turned on her heel and walked toward the three boys. They slowed down and spread apart on the sidewalk. When she stepped directly up to the one in the center, he stopped, not sure what he was going to do, but certain he didn't want to bump into her. "Hold it, all three of you," she said. "I want to talk to you."

The other two stopped, looking at her warily with half-averted faces. "What?" said the one on her left.

As she looked at the three unpromising young men, the idea came to her fully formed. The only question was whether she could convince them. "Are you doing anything tonight?" she asked.

The one on her right said, "We're not doing anything," with no inflection. He didn't know whether she was accusing or inviting, but either way that was the right answer.

Jane reached into her purse and they all tensed to move, as though they expected her to douse them with tear gas, an event that was probably not out of the question on these streets at night. She ran her fingers along the lining of her purse and found the Katherine Webster identification packet. She flashed the business card at them. "Katherine Webster, Treasury Department," she said.

"We didn't do nothing," said the one in the center.

"I didn't ask," she said. "I want to know if you're interested in working for a few hours."

"Doing what?" He was very suspicious now.

She pointed up at the lighted window of the Enterprise Development office. "There's a man in that office who's a suspect. In a while he's going to get into a car and drive out of town. You follow him, I follow you. If he spots you, turn off and go home. If he doesn't, you follow him to wherever he's going, you call a number, leave the address on the answering machine, and go home."

"Why us?" said the one on the left.

Jane quoted from an imaginary field manual. "If in the judgment of the investigating agent it is useful to deputize or otherwise employ private citizens in order to avoid detection by the surveillant, he or she is authorized to do so." She waited for a moment while they deciphered this, then said, "You don't have to do it. I can pay you per diem and a performance bonus if you work out."

"What does that mean?" asked the one on the right.

"A hundred dollars each to cover your expenses on the drive. That's the per diem. It means 'per day,' and you don't declare it on your tax return." She caught the amused glance from the one in the middle to the one on the left when he heard that. "Another two hundred each if he doesn't see you. You could each make three hundred before the sun comes up."

"What makes it worth that?"

"He's armed, he's dangerous, and he's smart. If he stops, you've got to keep going. Don't get yourself into a spot where his car is stopped and so is yours. He'll probably kill you."

The three looked at each other. There were a few shrugs and head tilts, but no smirks. The part about killing seemed to have raised their level of interest considerably. She had forgotten for a moment about seventeen-year-old boys. There had never been a moment in human history when anybody hadn't been able to recruit enough of them for a war. She reached into her purse again and said, "The per diem is in advance." She started to count the bills in front of them.

The one in the middle said to the one on the right, "You want to use your car or mine?"

"You have two?" asked Jane.

"Yeah," said the one in the middle.

"Use them both and you each get an extra hundred."

Mary was leaning against the tiled wall of the shower stall in the big first-floor bathroom of the farmhouse. They had finally left her alone, her right wrist handcuffed to the shower head so that she could never quite sit down. She tried to stand on her own, but she felt faint and unsteady. This was probably why they had chained her that way. If she fell she would hurt her arm, but she probably couldn't kill herself by hitting her head on the tiles.

When she looked down at her legs she could see the bruises were already a deep purple, and the welts were red and swelling. She had tried to kick out at them, but they had not grabbed her or tried to wrestle with her; they had simply clubbed the leg that came up at them, and when she kicked out again they would hit it again, until finally she couldn't get the leg to kick.

The two men had not spoken, even to each other. They went about it in a cold, impersonal silence, like people in a slaughterhouse working on an animal. They left the hood on her head the first time, but not because they didn't want her to see their faces; it was because they had no desire to see hers. Desire had nothing at all to do with it. The next time, when she was thinking that maybe it was better that she couldn't breathe, because dying was just going to sleep and being awake was every nightmare she had ever had, they took the hood off. She could see them doing it, their faces intent but detached, whatever they were feeling not comprehensible to her as emotion. Their faces were not like the faces of men having intercourse, but unselfconscious and empty, as though no other human being were present. She had always thought of rape as a crime of hatred, or the sick pleasure of exerting power over somebody who was helpless. But this didn't seem to bring them even that feeling of triumph; they were just using what was there because it was there.

At first she cried and screamed. She said, "No, please. You're hurting me." The one who was holding her tightened his grip, but the one who was doing it to her didn't pay any attention at all. He didn't seem to be able to understand. Her voice was the call of a bird or the bark of a dog, something he could hear but that carried no meaning at all.

When they left they chained her to the shower, still naked. She tried to take what was left of herself and put it back together, but she couldn't. She was torn apart, a lot of fragments that she couldn't seem to collect. After a long time she started to think again. Her mind kept ticking off an automatic inventory of hurts and injuries that kept being the same over and over, as though it were establishing the boundaries. Then she began to imagine herself telling Barraclough what they had done to her, and saw him decide to kill them for it. She was valuable. But even while she thought about it, there was a small, nagging voice somewhere just below hearing to remind her that she wasn't important. She wasn't really worth anything at all.

It was midnight when Farrell emerged from the back door of the building. He walked a hundred feet to the rear of the parking lot, opened the trunk of a dark sedan at the rear of the lot, took out a large hard-sided briefcase, and then turned and walked back into the building.

Jane waved to her lookout and pointed at the front entrance, then started her car. A moment later, Farrell came out the front door. A young man drove up to the curb in a white station wagon, got out, and stood on the sidewalk while Farrell took his place behind the wheel. Jane watched the boys she had hired. The lookout had been in the narrow space between two buildings, and already he was gone. He had waited long enough to see the car Farrell was driving, and now he was in the back of the building getting into his companion's car.

When Farrell started off and turned right, she saw the boys' black Trans-Am already on the right street, crossing the intersection after him. The second car, a sedate-looking brown Saturn, only joined in after she had counted to eight. She turned around in order to avoid passing the office building, went down the side street, and joined the convoy three blocks later.

She followed the three cars onto the freeway, fell back a quarter mile, and watched the Saturn's taillights. She had given the boys a short course on following cars while they waited for Farrell to move, and now she watched them work. On a freeway all they had to watch Farrell for was an exit. They stayed well back from him. When there were packs of cars on the road ahead they moved up and hid among them. They didn't change lanes when he did. They waited, showing a clear preference for the right lane, where it was difficult for him to notice them, and other cars entered the freeway and slipped in to put a new set of headlights in his mirror for a few minutes.

After they were north of the city and the traffic thinned out a bit, the second car passed the one in front and stayed there until it was possible that Farrell was getting used to the new set of headlights, and then it dropped to the rear again. Jane drove conservatively, watching the taillights of her decoys and holding herself in reserve. She was beginning to feel a little more hopeful now. Every minute that passed, Farrell would come closer to accepting the conclusion that he had not been followed.

Mary had been left alone in the shower stall for hours. She had begun to spend long periods trapped in her own mind. She would try to strengthen herself. "I did this. I chose to trade my life for the life of a little boy. This is the best thing that I have ever done. It's the best that any human being ever does. I'm past the decision, the part where I'd have been weak if I had thought about it, so no matter what happens to me now, I can't fail. I can do this." But there was another feeling, one that didn't respond in its own words. It was just like an echo that revealed the hollowness of the sounds Mary was making. She was a fraud. She was not brave enough. It was self-deception. She had stepped off a cliff and now as she was falling she was regretting it more every second. Then she would wonder. Priests said that if a person made a pure unselfish act of contrition at the very last moment, she would be forgiven, her whole life validated retroactively. But what if she did make the promise, the sacrifice, and then wanted to take it back much more sincerely with every single breath? She wished she had died before she had ever had that moment of madness.

Then there were sounds outside the door, men's voices, big heavy feet on the floorboards, and she tried to stand without holding on to the wall, but she couldn't. It wasn't that she was hurt, but her muscles didn't want to contract when her mind willed them to. They were quivering and weak.

When the door swung open she felt an impulse to scream, but even her throat was paralyzed. Just a harsh, raspy "Huh" came out. The man came into the room and closed the door. It was Barraclough. She cringed and tried to disappear into the corner of the shower as he walked toward her. She tried to cover herself with the one arm she could use.

After a moment she realized that he was paying no attention to her. He walked across the tile floor, looked around, and stopped. He seemed only to be making sure she was alive. Then to her surprise he turned to go.

"Wait," she said. "Don't you want to talk?" She was fighting the fear that he was going out to let the other two come in again.

He said, "What do you want?"

"They raped me," she tried to say, but her face seemed to collapse and shrivel inward, and she couldn't control her voice, so it broke into a sob.

"Don't waste my time," he said. It sounded like a warning. It didn't matter what they did to her because she wasn't a regular person anymore, a being who had the right to keep anything as hers, even her body. She had thrown her rights away. She was a criminal and she had been caught. She longed to change that, or at least hide it from him.

"Look, this has been a mistake. You seem to think I'm somebody I'm not. I didn't do anything or hurt anybody." She pointed to the door. "They hurt me. But I can understand; they didn't know they weren't supposed to. I'll just forget that it ever happened. Like a bad dream. We'll never mention it again. You let me go - anywhere you like. Drive me someplace so I don't know where this house was."

He looked at her with an expression that froze her. It came from a vast distance. It seemed to detect everything at once: her abject fear, her guilt, her lying - no, not just that she was lying but that she was a liar. His expression showed that he knew all of it, and that it inspired disgust and contempt. For the first time he even seemed to contemplate her naked body, but not with lust. It was the way a god would look down at it from a great height. She was dirty, bruised, covered with sweat, and throbbing with pain, a small, unremarkable female creature who would have been unappetizing at any time but was now filthy and cowering.

It made her desperate, as though she were standing alone on a shore and the ship was drifting farther away.

"I'm not naive, and I know you aren't. Sure, I have money. That's what you want, and I've got it. You seem to forget, I didn't get caught. I came to you. Why do you suppose I did that? I know you want some money from me, but I also want something from you. I took lots of banks for lots of money while the time was right. And I wasn't alone. I know people you haven't even heard of who took a whole lot more than I did. I can bring them to you. I can deliver them here."

His expression didn't change, and it made her more desperate.

"You'd really be making a mistake to waste a resource like me." She was sweating and horrified at how unconvincing she sounded, but she couldn't stop, could only go on like a drowning swimmer. "I took the Bank of Whalen for six million dollars on a piece of land I'd bought for half a million a month before. I'm a moneymaker. When I bought out Harrison Savings, I used their own money to leverage an option on a controlling interest and then made the bank pay back the loan as an operating cost. I can do all of it again." His face didn't change. "I can do new things because a person who knows how to make money will always know."

When he turned toward the door and took a step, she tried to stop talking, but she couldn't. "If you don't want to get into business, I understand. You want it quick and clean and simple. So take me to a bank. Any major bank can do an electronic transfer. I'll get the money, hand it over, and everybody can go away."

He was at the door now, and she waited for him to turn and look back at her so that she could read his features. Maybe there would be something false in his expression to let her know that he didn't really intend to kill her. He opened the door without hesitation and walked out.

Jane drove through the night thinking about the station wagon far ahead of her. She knew all of the reasons Farrell had chosen it. There was something benign about station wagons. The drivers were people who hauled kids around and had houses in the suburbs. They were also useful because if you put a good tarp down in the cargo bay you could carry a fairly stiff corpse without breaking any joints or doing any cutting.

Maybe Mary had already broken and told them how to get her money. It took time to do that to a person, but she wasn't coming into this fresh. She was already exhausted and disoriented when she first saw Barraclough. She had been in prison for a month, and then spent the next month running and hiding, getting burned out of a house, and then running some more. The belief that had been nurtured in the human brain that a person could endure physical and psychological torture without revealing secrets was probably accurate. The notion that more than one person in a thousand could do it was idiotic.

Mary had one advantage. She was smart enough to know that within an hour of the moment when Barraclough had her money, she would die. It might make her hold out for an extra couple of hours. There was no doubt in Jane's mind that at some point Barraclough would make dying seem like an attractive alternative to whatever was happening to Mary, but first she would offer all of the stalls that she could imagine - lies, promises, con games. As long as she kept trying new ones instead of giving in and telling the truth, she would keep breathing.

Farrell had driven deep into the San Joaquin Valley.

Some time in the past hour the signs marking ways to go east to Bakersfield and Tulare had ended and been replaced by signs for Fresno. Suddenly Jane caught the flashing of tail lights ahead as the two follower cars tried to slow down without getting closer to Farrell's station wagon. They slowed to forty and Jane let herself glide up behind them in time to see Farrell turning off the highway.

She watched the first car take the exit ramp to go up the road after Farrell. The sign at the top of the ramp said men-dota 20. When Farrell stopped at the lighted island of a gas station, the boys drove past, then pulled over to wait a quarter mile down the road while he filled up his tank. Jane drove up the road, stopped ahead of the boys, and kept her eyes on Farrell's car as she hurried to the driver's window. She held out a handful of hundred-dollar bills. "Here," she said. "This is far enough. Pay your buddies."

The boy protested. "This can't be the end of the road."

"For you it is." she said, and stepped back to her car.

When Farrell had paid the gas station attendant and gotten back into his car, he drove a mile down the road to a motel. Jane watched him go into the lighted office, then come out with a key and go into a room. She pounded the steering wheel in frustration. This wasn't it. He was going to sleep Two hours before dawn Mary almost fell asleep. She woke up with a start, gripped by the feeling that she was falling, and slapped her hand against the side of the shower stall to hold herself up. The second day began for her at that moment. She was feeling a dread so deep that there was no difference between the dream and what was happening. The ground was coming up faster and faster, and when she hit she would be dead.

An hour after dawn she saw the doorknob turn. When the door opened she saw it was Barraclough. He was naked too this time. He unlocked her handcuff and left the key in it, turned on the shower, and held her under it for a long time, turning her this way and that as though he wanted to be sure she was clean enough. Then he turned her face to the wall. He never spoke. He just put his foot between hers and kicked each of her feet outward a little so she would know, and put a hand on her back. This time she did not struggle. She stood stiff and still like a dead person while he forced himself into her. After a few moments he slapped her buttock hard with one hand, then grasped her wet hair in the other and gave it three hard tugs. Slowly, a little at a time, she understood what he wanted and began to move her hips with him.

After he had finished with her, he turned on the shower again, washed himself as though she were not there, then turned the water off, refastened her handcuff, and left the room. As soon as the door closed, she began to cry. She had no idea how long it went on, because time was no longer something that had meaning. Finally the tears simply stopped and she was gripped by a fully formed, uncontrollable anger. She wanted them to come in. Her fingers clutched at the air, wanting to claw their eyes. Her jaw clenched, her mouth salivating at the thought of biting a throat and clinging to the man while the others tried to tear her loose.

The anger left her as abruptly as it had come, but as she leaned against the wall in the shower again she discovered that the anger had left something inside her. It was small and hard and clean like the scar from a burn. She studied it, touching it the way her tongue might touch a little sore in her mouth, over and over until it knew the place and the pain and the shape. She knew what she was going to do. Of all the people this might happen to, Mary had the best chance of carrying it off. She had a good head for numbers.

A few hours later Barraclough returned with the tape recorder. He plugged it in at the outlet by the sink for electric shavers, then turned it on. Mary watched him warily. Now must be the time when he was going to get her to talk. But then she heard a sound like the swish of a car going by, then several of them at once, then Jane's voice saying "You've been chasing Mary Perkins, I've been hiding her. Now I'm ready to sell her."

"Why?" That was Barraclough.

"I've been at this a long time. A lot of people would be dead without me."

"I've heard that. Sometime I'll get you to give me a list."

"No, you won't. Mary Perkins isn't the sort of person I want to risk my life for. She's not worth it. I gave her a chance and she disappointed me. I know that she's got a lot of money. You seem to think you can get it. I'm not interested in that kind of work."

"You know what will happen when I have her?"

"You'll end up with her money. I also know that if you have her. she's not coming back to ask me how it happened."

Barraclough stared at Mary for a moment, then turned and walked away into the rest of the house, the part where people who were free could walk.

Mary tried to laugh. She wanted Barraclough to hear her laugh, but it was so low and empty that he couldn't have heard it. She knew why he had played the tape. She was supposed to think that Jane had really been selling her. But how could he expect her to believe that? She had been in on the plan from the beginning.

But then she thought about what she had heard, and she knew. He was playing it to let her know that Jane had caught him on tape, and that she had thrown the evidence away. She was so stupid that she had forgotten to leave the tapes in the car when she had gone to him. She had forgotten there were any tapes. He would have been caught and convicted of her kidnapping, rape, and murder except for her unbelievably stupid mistake. She felt burning humiliation and shame. She was going to die a horrible, slow, degrading, painful death and the last thing she would remember was that she had let her killer go free.

It was another hour before she moved beyond herself and thought about Jane. "Mary Perkins isn't the sort of person I want to risk my life for.... I gave her a chance and she disappointed me." The reason Jane sounded so convincing on the tape was that she was telling the truth. Mary knew how to lie, and she had lied the same way. "She's not worth it." Even Barraclough, who caught liars for a living, was fooled because the words were literally true. Then the last part came back to her. "I know if you have her she isn't coming back..." That was true too. She was here, chained, injured, and hungry, and it was going to go on and on until she was dead.