Dance for the Dead

25

Jane waited until she was positive that Farrell was asleep, drove the mile back to the gas station to fill the tank of her own car, and returned to the motel. She was so exhausted that she was afraid she would doze off and wake up hours later to find Farrell's station wagon gone. She walked close to his car and looked in the windows. For a moment she considered hiding in the cargo section in the back and letting him drive her to Mary, but dismissed the idea. He would have a gun, and she would probably wake up about the time he flipped off the safety to fire it into her head.

Then she saw something lying on the dashboard, a yellow, crumpled piece of paper. She moved closer and recognized that it was a receipt from an American Express card. It was so wrinkled that she could barely read the machine printing on it. She took her pen and a receipt from her purse and wrote down the information - the name David R. King, the expiration date, and the thirteen-digit number - then walked to the pay telephone at the convenience store across the street.

She looked at the back of Catherine Snowdon's American Express card and dialed the number printed on it.

"Customer Service," said the voice. "May I help you?"

Jane said, "Yes. I'm afraid I have a problem and I guess you can tell me what to do. My husband's wallet has been lost, and his American Express card was in it."

"Account number?"

Jane read it off her receipt.

"Expiration date?"

"Next August. He's in the hospital. There was an accident and they brought him in, and his wallet somehow disappeared. I don't know if - "

"I understand," said the woman gently. "We'd better not take a chance. I'm going to cancel the card as of now. He'll be receiving a new one in the mail in a couple of days with a new number."

"But what happens if somebody else has it?"

"That's all explained in detail on the back of your statement. Basically you have nothing to worry about. You did the right thing by calling. Thank you very much. I hope your husband recovers quickly."

"Thank you," said Jane. She took some time walking back to the motel, formulating the details of her story.

She opened the office door with an air of authority and looked around. It was a bright morning already, but the young man behind the desk looked as exhausted as she felt. The hair on the back of his head was standing out in tufts from lying back in his chair while he watched a dreadful dubbed movie on the small television set beside him. At the moment several muscular men in fur kilts were swinging clumsily at each other with swords and taking a terrible toll on the columns of the Parthenon. He stood up and leaned his elbows on the counter. "May I help you?"

"I'm Kit Snowdon," Jane said. "American Express Fraud Division. I'm afraid we've got a little problem."

The young man switched off the swordsmen behind him and looked as though he were glad she had come along. "How can I help?"

"You have a gentleman staying in Room 4 who is in possession of a stolen American Express card. He would be registered under the name David R. King."

The young man was shocked. "But I ran his card on the machine. There's got to be some mistake."

"Run the numbers again." She allowed her voice to betray a tiny portion of the impatience she was feeling.

He picked the receipt out of the drawer, pushed a few buttons to get onto the phone line, then punched the numbers in. After a few seconds the machine rattled off a message from the central computers in North Dakota or someplace. He looked sick. "They want me to confiscate the card."

"The computer always says that. We haven't had a computer beat up yet," she said. "Ignore it."

"But - "

"If you ran the card before, you must have gotten a look at him. Did he look like somebody you want to take a card from?"

"No." He shook his head solemnly, then looked at the telephone on the counter. "Should I call the police?"

Jane sighed wearily. "I'll lay it out for you. He's been traveling for two days. He has two other cards and he's got some charges - maybe fifteen hundred by now. If I apprehend him, he gets charged with petty larceny. If I can get him without making a legal mistake and if the company lawyers follow through, he gets ninety days - tops. If I follow him another day or two and he gets the bill up over three thousand, then it's grand theft, forgery, maybe possession of stolen property, and the judge gets to swing hard. In fact, he has to."

"What do we do?"

"I've been following him for two days," said Jane. "I'm asleep on my feet. I want you to check me into a room and watch his door while I get some sleep. The minute you know he's awake, ring my room."

"What if he checks out? Should I slow him down?"

"Don't do anything you wouldn't normally do, except this time buzz my room. That's all." She handed him the Catherine Snowdon credit card.

The kid slid it across the slot of his machine and handed it back to her with the key. "I'm sorry I messed up with the authorization. I was positive - "

"You didn't mess up," said Jane. "He altered the magnetic strip to change one digit, or the machine would have said 'Tilt.' The real pros know how to do that. Just be sure he doesn't slip away. If you go off duty, make sure the next guy knows what to do."

She went into her room and slept in her clothes. The call came in the evening. When she picked up the receiver there was nobody on the other end. He must be in the office, so the boy could do nothing but press the button for her room. She was on her feet instantly, standing by the window. His station wagon was still in the lot in front of Room 4. She slipped out her door, turned away from the office, walked around the building, got into her car, and followed Farrell down the street past the freeway entrance. He pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket, got out of his car, and walked into the store.

Jane looked at her watch. Some of the mystery of his movements was dispelled. It was eight-thirty p.m. He had left his office in a clean car at midnight and driven through the rest of the night. When he was positive he had not been followed, he had slept through the day in the motel room under a fake name. If he was wrong about being followed, probably the pursuers would have made a move of some kind while he slept. If they had lost him somewhere during the long drive, he would have been invisible for a whole day, while they were forced to widen their search to places he had never been, dispersing and exhausting themselves.

Now he was sure he had nothing to worry about, and he was going grocery shopping. That made sense too. They could not have known they were going to be using the safe house. They probably didn't visit it often enough to keep fresh food there. When Barraclough had gotten Mary, he had simply changed cars and driven her up here.

There was another side to what Farrell was doing, and it made her feel anxious again. He had efficiently changed himself into a nocturnal creature. Jane had taken a few people out of the world who had been held by someone who wanted information, and they had told her what it was like. The captors would wear them down for days, alternately abusing and ignoring them, depriving them of sleep and food until some chemical imbalance occurred and they began to lose themselves in a depressive psychosis that seemed to bounce erratically from guilt to anger, but hopeless guilt and anger. The tormentors who understood the process would begin their final interrogation when the mind was weakest and most vulnerable, between two and five in the morning. Tonight when Mary woke up, starved, exhausted, and probably injured, there would be a new face. He would be fresh and sharp and tireless, and by now it would seem to her that he could read her mind.

Jane could see Farrell through the front window of the store filling a shopping cart. The moment was going by, and when it was gone there would not be another. She got out of her car and walked toward the station wagon. She could see his overnight bag on the seat, the crumpled receipt from the motel on the dashboard. She moved out of sight behind the truck parked beside the station wagon and watched the window of the store until she saw him move around the shelves at the end of the aisle. Then she walked to the front of his car, pretended to drop her keys, and knelt down to pick them up. While she was kneeling she slipped her hand under the front bumper and stabbed the lower radiator hose with her pocketknife, stood up, and walked on to the corner of the building where she could see the checkout aisles.

She watched while the clerk ran Farrell's groceries along the conveyor belt and past the cash register, then put them into bags. The first had quart-sized bottles on the top. The second had round bulges of fruits and vegetables, double-bagged in smaller sacks inside. The third had cartons of orange juice, milk in a plastic jug, and a box of cereal. She turned and made her way back to the truck parked by Farrell's car.

She waited while he slipped his key into the driver's door lock and electronically released the rest of the locks so he could load his groceries, then put the three bags in the cargo bay. He finished, then turned to push his cart back to the collection rack, twenty paces away.

Jane moved along the right side of the car to the back seat door, slipped the rubber band off her ponytail, doubled it, opened the door, slipped the rubber band over the catch in the door lock, then eased it shut again. Then she moved back around the truck out of sight and made her way back to her own car.

Farrell drove out of the lot and turned east across the flat farm country toward Mendota. Jane glanced at her watch, walked into the store, and bought a can of cola and a box of plastic straws. Then she got into her car, waited three minutes, and drove out after him. She could picture what was happening. When the station wagon's engine started, the water pump began to circulate the coolant, taking the water from the leaky bottom radiator hose, while some of it drained from the hole. As soon as the engine reached its optimum temperature, the thermostat would open. He would go a few miles before his temperature gauge went wild, because the expansion tank would empty, keeping the engine cool until that coolant too drained out the hose onto the road.

She drove down the dark road until she saw the car pulled over on the right shoulder. She turned off the road, killed her lights, and watched. There was no sign of him. Far ahead along the road a truck pulled over to the side and she could see him caught in its lights for a moment, waving it down. He climbed into the truck and it drove toward her. She turned on her lights, pulled back onto the road, and passed it, but as soon as it was out of sight she turned around and drove back to Farrell's car.

She opened the backseat door, took the rubber hair band off the latch, and pulled up the button on the driver's side to unlock the tailgate. She had thought it through carefully on her drive, so she had no decisions to make. She put a tiny slit in the plastic milk jug, stuck a plastic straw into her perfume bottle of water hemlock and mayapple, put her finger over the end, inserted the straw into the milk bottle, and let it drain into the milk. Then she moved the gummed price tag to cover the slit.

She did the same to the cartons of orange juice. The flat packages of meat were an experiment because she had no idea what cooking would do to the chemical composition of the clear liquid, but the holes in the cellophane wrappings were easy to hide, so she used them. She was confident about the bottle of scotch because the alcohol would hide any taste. She found the cap could be opened and reclosed by peeling the blue tax stamp off with her knife instead of tearing it, then pasting it down with a little spit. She was certain that even if a bit of the food was intended to reward Mary for talking, the scotch was for the men. Alcohol made people too reckless to be afraid and too stupid to remember, and it dulled pain. She left the vegetables alone because they would be washed and boiled, but she made a tiny incision in each of the apples and pushed the straw far enough into the depression at the bottom to reach the almost-hollow core, so the poison would come out as juice and the white of the apple would not be discolored by contact with the air.

When the perfume bottle was empty Jane closed the tailgate, went to the driver's side, pushed down the button to relock all the doors, and then drove her own car a mile down the road to wait for Mary Perkins's interrogator to return with a new hose for his radiator.

26

It had been nearly forty-eight hours since Mary had walked across five lanes of the Ventura Freeway and gotten into the car. She did not know this because time had already become one more thing that had to do with other people. Sometimes so much happened in a very short time. If one of the men hit her, the bright sharp suddenness seemed to explode into pain and wonder, then bleed on into the next several hours, slowly tapering down into something she knew but didn't feel.

At first she had been most afraid of permanence. There was some instinct that told her it didn't matter if they gave her a sensation that made her scream, not because having it happen so many times had made her used to it but because it left something. It was like dividing her in half. Each time they did it, half of her was gone. Then they would divide the half, and she would be smaller, but no matter how many times they hurt her, some tiny fraction of her would be left. Even if all that was left at the end was the size of a germ, someday it might grow back. But if they blinded her or crippled her, her eyes or legs would not grow back. She had a deep animal urge to keep her body intact.

But even this feeling was faded now. She had gone from fear to despair. She could not force herself to imagine a future. The past was all lies, arrogance, and deception, and she could not think about her life as separate events now. Even Mary Perkins was more filth she had made up and smeared on herself. She was Lily Smith, and she was sorry.

Sometime after the little window high on the wall in the bathroom turned dark again, a man she had never seen before walked in carrying a briefcase. He was older and had gray, bristly hair. He wore a gray suit with a coat that seemed a little too tight in the shoulders, and a pair of shoes that looked as though he polished them a lot. She thought of him as Policeman. He brought with him a straight-backed chair that appeared to be part of a dining room set and sat down on it.

He watched her with eyes that looked serious and alert, but there didn't seem to be anything else behind them. He had no predatory gleam, no cold contempt. He was simply waiting. She wanted to please him, to deal with this new person and win him over to her side.

She began slowly and logically because she had failed so miserably with Barraclough, and this one seemed even more touchy, more likely to dismiss her and go away. "I would like to rind a way to make this end." She tried to sound ingratiating, but her voice came out toneless and monotonous.

He pursed his lips and nodded, as though he were giving her permission to go on. "I know."

She ventured a little further. "Nobody has asked me any questions."

He shrugged. "There's no hurry."

This was like a weight tied to her. "Why?"

He said, "We destroyed the tapes you made of the meeting on the freeway - "

"I didn't do that," she interrupted.

He raised an eyebrow as a warning. She winced, forcing herself to keep silent. That was how she had earned Barraclough's contempt, and if she did it to this one, her last chance would be gone. They both knew she was an accessory to the crime, so she accepted it.

He said, "Your girlfriend Jane wrote you off. She turned up yesterday at the L.A. airport. Operatives followed her to Chicago." He opened his briefcase and lifted out a big plastic food-storage bag with a seal on the top like the ones they used for evidence. Inside was a long shock of shiny black hair. He placed it back in the briefcase. "It seems to me that there's nobody else who even knows that you're missing. You've been traveling under false names for some time."

She had not realized until now that she had been living on the assumption that Jane was alive. If she was gone, then Policeman was right. Enduring a day or a year made no difference because nobody in the world knew she was gone. There was no possibility that she could ever leave this room. She repeated, "Is there any way that I can end this?"

Policeman looked at her judiciously. "It all depends on you."

A tiny hope began to return. It was from a different source this time, and it seemed more genuine than imagining that Jane could convince the authorities to break down the door to save her. Now that Jane was gone, she could see how foolish she had been to think of it at all. She said, "What do I do?"

He said, "Let's talk."

"All right."

"Tell me what happened the day you left the Los Angeles County Jail."

"I took a bus to the airport. Then I saw Jane."

"What color was the bus?" He asked her questions without appearing to listen to the content of the answers, just watching to see if she was lying.

"What name did you use in Ann Arbor?"

"Donna Kester. Jane picked it. She had cards and things in that name."

"Where did you go when you left there?"

"Let's see. Ohio. We hitched a ride with a student to Columbus, then Cleveland. The Copa Motel."

"Did you pay cash?"

"No. Credit cards. She had lots of credit cards, all in different names."

"What name did she use at the Copa?"

"I'm not sure. I think it was Catherine Snowdon." She told him the addresses of the hotels and motels, the agencies where they had rented cars, the routes they had driven - everything that came out of her memory. She wanted to please him. He seemed to be rooting for her, hoping she would pass. He wrote nothing down, but he seemed to be listening for mistakes. Each time a detail struck his ear as wrong, he would interrupt.

"How did you get into a women's dormitory at night? They're locked." It would always be something irrelevant, but it would be like a slap because it made her remember something else to prove she was giving him everything.

Finally, when the questions didn't bring any new answers, he stood up and took a step toward the door.

"Wait," she said. "Don't go. I've done everything, given you everything. What do you expect me to do?"

Policeman opened his briefcase again, pulled out a blank piece of paper, took a black felt-tipped pen out of his shirt pocket, closed the briefcase, and set the pen and paper on the chair. Then he walked to the shower, unlocked the handcuff from her wrist, turned, and walked out the door. She heard him locking it behind him.

She could not believe her good fortune. She stepped unsteadily to the chair. She started by printing the names as neatly as she could: Bahamas Commonwealth Bank; Union Bank of Switzerland; Banco de America Central of the Cayman Islands; International Credit Bank of Switzerland. The names themselves brought back the numbers, clear and fresh and clean in her mind, because numbers always were.

When she was finished, she left the pen and the paper on the seat of the chair and went back to her shower stall. After a long time. Policeman came through the door, picked up the chair and the piece of paper, and walked out the door.

It took them a few hours to do whatever they had needed to do to verify that the accounts existed. Then Policeman came in with Barraclough. This time Barraclough carried the papers. They were bank-transfer authorizations. Across the top was the name of one of her banks and the account number. Across the bottom of each one was the account where all of the money was going: Credit Suisse 08950569237. Her hatred clutched the numbers to her and clung to them as though they were the eyeballs of the men in the house.

When she was finished signing the papers they took them and walked out of the room without speaking to her. She had a strange sense of relief now. Her body felt light, as though she could dance or just rise up into the air. She held the numbers in her head and played with them like colored billiard balls that clicked when she moved them. Oh, eight ninety-five, oh, five sixty-nine, two thirty-seven. No fours or ones. First letters, O-E-N-F-O-F-S-N-T-T-S. 08950569237.

Jane sat in the dark and studied the gravel drive beside the house. There were the white station wagon, a white van, and a dark gray Dodge that looked like the same model as the red one they had used to bring Timmy to the freeway meeting. The small white house looked as though it had once been a real farmhouse where a family had lived and worked the broad flat fields around it, probably back in the thirties.

Jane knew she was going to have to do everything as quickly as she could. In an hour or two the sun would be up and one of them would look out a window. She had left the car a mile away by the side of the road, so there was no chance of using it as a blind.

She moved a little closer to the house, slowly and quietly, watching for signs that they had wired the grounds somehow. She had seen a beige box on the back side of the gate that she guessed was a motion sensor, and she had given the long gravel drive a wide berth because of it. She had come in across the empty field and seen nothing electronic since then.

She had imagined the safe house would be something big and fancy and in proportion with Barraclough's ambitions. But if Barraclough owned such a place, he wasn't going to make the mistake of committing crimes there. This house was small, unobtrusive, and run-down.

He was too smart to have the fantasy that he could make any building impregnable. This one looked as though he expected to just walk away from it one day. His protection wasn't the delusion that he could keep the police out if they wanted to get in; it was the high probability that they would never try.

As soon as Jane saw the van she knew she was going to have to look inside it. If Mary was dead, they would not leave her body in the house for long. They would wrap it and place it in the back of the van so they could clean the house without any worry that there would be new blood when they moved it. The inside of a van could be washed with a hose. She moved quietly to the back of the van and looked in the rear window. The floor was lit enough by the moonlight through the windshield for her to tell there was nothing big enough on the floor to be a corpse. She could see the spare tire fastened with a wing nut on the right side just inside the rear door. She tried the door handle and found it unlocked, so she reached inside and searched around the tire by touch. When she found the tire iron she took it out and slipped it into her belt, then closed the door quietly and moved back out into the field.

She selected a spot a hundred feet from the house where the alfalfa had grown to about ten inches. Since the farm had not been worked for decades, the land had not been plowed and the thatch from other seasons lay thick on the surface. The tire iron was thick and heavy, and the chisel end that was designed for taking off hubcaps dug through it easily and reached rich, soft, black dirt only an inch down. She broke the earth and softened it, then took off her black sweatshirt, loaded double handfuls onto it, and used it as a sack to help her spread the dirt around the field in the deep grass. When the trench was longer than she was and ten inches deep, she gathered the tufts of alfalfa and thatch she had removed, lay down, and began to bury her legs.

The dawn came slowly, while the low fields were still blanketed with wet fog. It was still half an hour before sunrise when she heard the front door of the house open. She lay still in her shallow grave with the blanket of alfalfa and thatch covering her to her neck, then the sweatshirt above her head with a layer of cut alfalfa over it. She clutched the tire iron. There were two sets of heavy footsteps on the front porch. She heard them clop down the wooden steps, then followed the quiet crunches on the gravel. She heard one car door slam, then another. Then there was the hum of an engine. She listened as the wheels rolled on the gravel toward the highway.

Jane lifted her head only far enough to see that it was the dark gray car that was gone, then lay back for a few minutes considering the implications. Two men were gone. It could mean that they had come to the end of Mary Perkins's interrogation and that she was dead. She decided this was not likely. There would be the body to worry about. Barraclough had more understanding of human nature than to leave the body and the cleaning entirely to some underling, and he certainly wouldn't send his trainees on an errand while he did the messy, stomach-turning work himself. He would supervise while at least two of them wrapped the body, put it in the van, and took it somewhere far from here, then buried it deep. Mary was alive.

Two men were gone. Jane waited for twenty minutes, listening for sounds from the house, before she moved. Jane had to use this time to find out where Mary was and how many men were still in the house. Quietly she rolled over in her trench and crawled out the end of it. She slipped to the side of the house, put her ear against one of the clapboards, and listened. She heard music. In a moment it stopped and she heard the muffled cadence of speech, but it was loud and exaggerated like the voice of an announcer, and then the music came on again. She moved to the front of the house and checked the window. The living room was almost empty. There were two chairs, an old couch, and a portable television set on a coffee table. She followed the sound of the radio around the house to the kitchen door.

She listened for a few minutes, but there were no other voices. She slowly stepped up beside the door and let one eye slide close to the corner of the screened window. Inside were two young men. They were lying on the floor beside the kitchen table. One of them was clutching his belly, and his mouth was open as though he were trying to scream, but his eyes were staring without moving. The other was facing away from her, but he too was still. She could see that they had begun to eat breakfast. Cereal and milk were spilled on the floor, and on the table were two empty glasses with little bits of orange pulp residue almost to their brims.

Jane swung her tire iron and smashed the small window over the door, reached inside and turned the knob. Neither of the men moved. She walked past them into the living room and quietly climbed the stairs to the second floor, holding the tire iron. She looked in the door of each room and saw only four empty, unmade beds. She descended the stairs again and found a closed door off the hallway. She tried the knob, but it was locked. She pushed the flattened end of the tire iron between the jamb and the door at the knob, lifted her foot to step on the lug end to set it, then pushed with all her strength. The door gave a loud creak and then a bang as it popped inward, bringing a piece of the woodwork with it.

The sight of Mary was worse than the sight of the two men Jane had poisoned. She was naked and bruised, one eye swelled so that it was nearly closed, her lips dry and so chapped that when her mouth moved a clotted wound at the corner cracked and a thin trickle of blood ran down to her chin. She didn't seem to have the strength to stand up, so she started to crawl across the bathroom floor toward Jane.

Jane stepped to her and put her arm around her waist to lift her to her feet. "Come on," she said.

"They said you were dead." Jane could barely hear her.

"I'm not, and you aren't either. We have to hurry. Where are your clothes?"

"I don't know." She was seized with tremors, and it was a moment before Jane heard the rest of what she was trying to say. "Just get me out."

"Stay here a minute," said Jane, and quickly went into the kitchen to search for car keys. They were lying on the counter. As she snatched them up, she sensed movement behind her.

Mary was reaching for the bottle of milk on the table. "No!" Jane said sharply, and knocked it to the floor. Mary cringed and stared at her without comprehension.

"I poisoned everything."

Mary seemed to notice the two men on the floor for the first time. They had died in terrible pain and convulsions, and their faces were so contorted that they didn't look quite human. She seemed to marvel at them. "They look so young," she said. "I thought they were older." Then she seemed to remember something she had known before. "The devil is always exactly your own age."

"Come on," said Jane. "We'll forget the clothes for now." She dragged Mary out of the kitchen and onto the porch. She tried the car key in the van, but it didn't fit. It opened the white station wagon, so she eased Mary into the passenger seat, started the engine, and drove up the driveway. "Here," she said, and put the black sweatshirt on Mary's lap. "It's dirty, but it's better than nothing. Put it on."

Jane drove the next mile staring into her mirrors and up the road ahead for signs of Barraclough and Farrell. When she reached the place where she had parked the gray Toyota, she pulled the station wagon up to it, put Mary in the back seat, and drove up the road. She said, "Keep down on the seat and rest. Whatever you do, don't put your head up. Do you need a doctor right away?"

"I don't want one," said Mary. Her voice was raspy and brittle, but it was beginning to sound stronger.

"We'll get you some clothes and some food as soon as we're far enough away. Nothing's open yet."

"Just get the clothes. I can eat on the plane."

"The plane?"

"I have to go to Texas."

Jane felt a reflex in her throat that brought tears to her eyes. She didn't want to let pictures form of what they had done to Mary, but there was no way to avoid thinking about it. She wasn't dead, because her heart was still beating and she could form words with her bruised face, but she could easily spend the rest of her life in a madhouse.

"Ask me why."

The voice was self-satisfied and coy, almost flirtatious.

Now Jane was going to have to follow Mary down whatever path her deranged mind was taking. She owed her a thousand times more than this tiny courtesy. "All right. Why?"

"Because I can remember numbers."

Jane tried to keep her calm. "I know, Mary. I noticed you were good with numbers the first time we talked. You're an intelligent, strong woman, and you're going to be okay." It was a lie. She was not going to be okay. Jane had done this to her. Barraclough had taken the bait and chewed it up.

"They finally made me give them the money I stole."

"I know," said Jane. "There's nobody who wouldn't have done what you did. Forget the money."

"Let me finish," said Mary impatiently. "They knew I had stolen it from banks, but they thought I did it by being an insect or a rat or something who crawled in and took it. It didn't even occur to them that the reason I could do it was that I know all about the business, and that I was smarter than the people I took it from. They filled out bank-transfer slips. They listed my bank account numbers and the number of the account where the money was supposed to go. I signed them all, one after another, so I saw it six times."

"Saw what six times?"

"There's no need to write it down. I can close my eyes and read it any time I want. 08950569237. He's transferring all the money into his bank account at Credit Suisse in Zurich. He has a numbered account, and that's the number. I captured it."

27

As Jane drove, Mary lay on the back seat talking at the roof of the car. "It has to be Dallas."

"Why Dallas? You told me once that you couldn't go there because people knew you."

"And I know them," said Mary. "They have you, and you have them. It's like the tar baby."

Jane tried to choose her words carefully. There would be nothing accomplished if she managed to nudge her own agitation into hysteria, but Mary had to know that it wasn't over. "I killed those two men back there. Barraclough wasn't there."

"Yes," said Mary. "He's in San Francisco."

"How do you know that?"

"That's where the big West Coast banks have their main offices. What he's doing right now is riding the jet stream, and you can't get on it very easily in some branch office in Stinkwood, Minnesota. All they can do for you is to ask the big offices to do it for them, and he can't fool around all day and let all those people know what he's doing."

"What do you mean by 'riding the jet stream'? Is he flying to Switzerland?"

"No," said Mary. "That's way too slow. Stock exchanges, bond markets, commodities, currency, the treasury securities of a hundred countries go up and down a hundred times a day. Some tyrant is shot in South America, and before the ambulance reaches the hospital, billions of dollars from Hong Kong are already buying up copper and coffee beans in London and New York. Barraclough isn't going to travel to Europe and then to the Caribbean to hand six tellers withdrawal slips and collect fifty-two million dollars. He's got to move the money the way big money moves - electronically, in thin air. Bonn, Paris, London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, L.A. Zurich, Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong." After a breath she added, "Dallas."

Jane tilted the rearview mirror to get a glimpse of Mary on the back seat. She was bloody, bruised, and exhausted, but she seemed to be describing something that was real. "You mean you want to try to get your money back? Is that what this is about?"

Mary Perkins gave a quiet cough, and Jane realized that it had been a kind of mirthless laugh. "You told me before and I didn't get it, did I? You have to strip yourself clean. Lose everything: friends, clothes, medical records, your name, even your hair. The money was the last thing to go. That's gone, Jane. I had to give it to him, and I put it right in his hands so I could see which pocket he stashed it in."

Jane dressed Mary in a pair of blue jeans because the welts and bruises on her legs were so bright and angry that a dress would not have covered enough of them, and it was impossible in the small store in Gilroy to buy any other kind of women's pants in a length that fit an actual, living woman. The blouse was off another rack in the same store, a plain blue shirt that would attract no attention and was big enough to let her shrink inside it without having much of the fabric touch her skin.

Jane left the car in the long-term lot in San Jose because Mary insisted there was no time for a more elaborate arrangement. "Get me to Dallas," she said. "After that I don't care."

"What don't you care about?"

"Anything."

Mary ate and drank on the plane, then slept the rest of the way to Dallas. At the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, Jane rented a car. As she drove it out of the lot, she asked, "Where is it?"

"Bank of Sanford, corner of Commerce and Field. Turn left here."

"It must be almost closing time," said Jane. "But we may be able to catch your friend coming out."

"We don't want to catch him coming out," said Mary. Her voice was still even and low, as though it were an enormous effort to talk. "We'll catch him on the way in. Everything happens at night."

They waited in the bank lobby until Jane saw that each customer who approached the wide glass doors hurried to give the nearest handle a tentative tug to be sure they weren't locked, then stepped inside with a small sigh of relief, and then during the walk to the tellers' windows, looked up at the clock built into the wall.

At one minute before four a man about forty years old with hair that was combed straight back to emphasize the gray hair at his temples entered the bank. He wore a lightweight suit that had a slight sheen to it, and on his feet were a pair of brightly shined shoes that it took Jane a second to recognize as cowboy boots.

"There he is," said Mary Perkins. She stood up quickly, but the barely audible groan she gave showed that it had cost her something. She stepped in front of the man. "Hello, Gene," she said. "It's me - Mary Perkins."

The man looked at her, puzzled, while he inhaled once, and then puffed the breath out when he remembered. His eyes shot around him in a reflex, as though he were checking to see who was watching. He said uncomfortably, "Well, now, Mary. How are you these days? I heard you had some problems a while back."

"Yes, I've been away," said Mary. "I can see that you're thinking I don't look like the experience did me any good. You're absolutely right."

The man's brow wrinkled a little to tilt his eyebrows in sympathy, and his mouth forced itself into a sad smile. "Well, I can see it's behind you now, and that's the main thing."

Mary said, "Do you still have an office? I'd like to talk to you about some business."

The man reflexively leaned back away from her. "Mary, you have to understand that things don't work the way they once did. It's nice to see you, but - "

Mary turned and nodded to Jane, who was still sitting in the overstuffed chair next to the marble table where the pens were chained. She stepped forward to join them, but she didn't smile. Mary said, "This is Katherine Webster from the Treasury Department. This is Gene Hiller, my old friend."

The man looked from one to the other. "Now wait a minute," he said. "What's going on?"

"Don't worry," said Mary. "If your time is coming, I don't know about it. Let's talk."

Jane began to open her purse and fiddle with the little black wallet, as though she were about to pull out a badge.

Gene Hiller looked around him again, then said quickly, "This way."

His office was small, a place where he could hang his coat while he was out in the computer room. As soon as they were inside, Mary closed the door and stood in a place that made it impossible for him to sit behind his desk where he felt safe. Jane could see that Mary had once been very good at this.

"Here it is, Gene," she said. "I've made a deal with Katherine here. I'm going to give the money back voluntarily." She seemed to notice the sweat forming on his pale forehead. "I'm not - confirm this for me, Katherine - not expected to testify against anyone who may have had anything to do with any of the illegal activities in which I was once engaged."

The muscles in his shoulders seemed to relax so that his neck actually got longer. "What... brings you here?"

"It seems I can't go to Zurich, pick up a check with a lot of zeros on it, and fly back here to hand it over." She gave Jane a sarcastic smile. "There's very little trust left in the world."

"I see," said Gene, but all he could see was that in Mary's mind Jane represented what was stopping her.

"My attorney tells me that in order to get past the judge a week from now, it has to be voluntary, and apparently spontaneous, as evidence that I feel remorse and have been rehabilitated sincerely. I can't appear to have bought my way out with the Treasury Department. This puts me in a serious bind. Consequently I have to ask old friends for help."

The threat was not wasted on him. If for some reason she could not give them the money, there was something else she could give them. "What do you want me to do?"

"An electronic transfer," she said. "Receive the money, then send it on a second later. Write this down, and get it right. Credit Suisse, 08950569237. If they need a transfer request, I'll sign one and you can fax it. If they ask for verification tell them I've furnished identification. The name I used was James Barraclough."

Gene looked at her for a moment. "Want to tell me why you put a false name on a numbered account in a Swiss bank?"

Mary said, "I'm rehabilitating myself these days, not giving anybody lessons."

His eyebrows slowly began to rise. He smelled something. "Where exactly do you want these funds sent?"

Mary took a deep breath and blew it out. "Turn on your payroll computer and punch up the account number where you send the money for federal tax withholding. Can you do that?"

"Sure. What then?"

"Transfer all of the money from the Swiss bank into that account without ever having it appear on your computers as a transaction received by this bank. Give it to the I.R.S."

She looked at Jane Whitefield. Her eyes were wet and red and hot. "You think that will do it?"

Jane nodded solemnly.

Gene Hiller took the paper and walked into the computer room. There was a screen with a long list of transactions he was supposed to monitor - money the Federal Reserve was lending the bank overnight, money the bank was moving into accounts all over the world to cover investments it had made during the day, adjustments to the accounts of the various branches, like water being poured from a pitcher to even out the levels of a hundred little cups.

Gene ignored these and went to another terminal, typed in the name of the Swiss bank and waited while their machine signified that it had heard and recognized his machine. Then he told it he had authorization to close a numbered account and transfer the money. He typed in the number and waited. After a moment he said, "You sure this number is right? It doesn't usually take this long."

"It's right," said Mary firmly. "Tell them again."

As he prepared to do it, something happened. Letters and numbers appeared on the screen to fill in blanks. He stared at it for a moment, then looked up at Mary. "Jesus, Mary, two hundred and six million dollars? You stole two hundred and six million?"

Mary almost smiled. "No, Gene. I only stole fifty-two. The rest I inherited. Send it now."

Gene typed in the number of the Internal Revenue Service account and tapped his return key. Before his fingers rebounded from the keyboard, the money was gone. He stared at the screen as though he were having trouble believing what he had seen, and certainly couldn't believe what he had done.

Mary said, "Probably nobody is ever going to ask you about this, but if they do, you don't know a thing. You didn't do it. That's part of the deal I made. There can't be any way in the world for anyone to get a penny of it back." She patted his shoulder. "That means you too, Gene."

"I'm not that stupid," he said. "Anybody who asks the I.R.S. to refund his two hundred and six million dollars is going to get a lot of things, but none of them will be a check."

"Right," said Mary. She leaned down and gave him a peck on the cheek. "Thanks, baby. Now I'll leave you alone for the rest of your life."

She walked out of the computer room with her head high and her shoulders back. Jane could tell that she was in pain, but she stood erect until Hiller had let them out the fire door and they were around the corner getting into the car. As soon as she sat down the strength seemed to go out of her, and her head rested on the seat.

"Mary?" said Jane. "You okay?"

"It was better than I ever dreamed. All the time I was in that house I was so scared, so hurt, that I thought he had opened an account just to take my money. But you have to open a numbered account in person. How could he do it that fast? He had me, but he had no place to put my money except in the account where he kept all the money he had stolen for years. I got to take every penny he had and pour it all into a sewer."

28

Jane drove fast across the flat plains of northern Texas. The night was just beginning, and she knew that she would need to use this time well. The trip from California to the Texas bank had taken them all day.

She tried to imagine what Barraclough was doing now. She was convinced that Mary knew enough about money to be reliable in her guess that Barraclough had driven to a bank in San Francisco that morning. He and Farrell could not have returned before about noon to find Mary gone and his two trainees dead.

He would have found Farreirs white station wagon by one o'clock and figured out that Jane and Mary had gotten into another car. Then he and Farrell would have spent more time disposing of the two bodies, cleaning the farmhouse of evidence that a woman had been held there, and removing any objects or prints that connected him with the property. That still left him with a van and two cars, with only Farrell to help him drive. He needed at least one person, perhaps two more people, he could trust to drive the vehicles back to Los Angeles. The most likely candidates would have to come all the way up from Enterprise Development in L.A.

She guessed that Barraclough would have been finished with all of this by nine or ten in the evening, about five hours after the time when all of his stolen money had disappeared. She said, "Is there some way Barraclough would know his account in Switzerland was gutted?"

Mary didn't answer. Jane glanced over her shoulder and saw that she was curled up like a child, asleep on the back seat. The question would have to wait. Probably the bank would send him some kind of written closing statement.

Jane couldn't risk going back to the airport and flying Mary out of Dallas tonight. If Barraclough had the presence of mind to ask for confirmation that the gigantic deposit he had made was credited to his account, he would be told that his account was closed. Even if the Swiss bank didn't know that the transfer to the Internal Revenue Service had been initiated in Dallas, there would probably be a way to find out. She had to assume Barraclough would have people searching Dallas before the sun came up.

She looked at Mary again, then returned her eyes to the road. She had been holding down the feelings for days, but now she let them surface. What she had done was unforgivable. She had used this woman for bait and let the beast have her. All she could do now was try to preserve what was left. Whatever had been holding Mary together - the delay of physical sensation that came from shock, or maybe merely the energy of sheer hatred - had apparently drained out of her now. Before she had fallen asleep she had been weak and vague enough to make traveling a risk. Jane would have to get her indoors before morning. She used the last eight hours of darkness to run north out of Texas and up the short side of Oklahoma.

It was still dark when Jane bumped up off the road onto the smooth asphalt surface of a gas station and turned off the car's engine. She heard Mary sit up in the back seat, so she turned around to watch her squinting and blinking at the lighted island, then reach up to run her fingers through her hair. Jane watched her slowly begin to remember. She was suddenly agitated. "Where are we? Why are we stopping?"

Jane chose to answer the first question. "Miami, Oklahoma."

"Where are we going?"

Jane was glad to hear the annoyance in Mary's voice. It was a vital sign, like a pulse or a heartbeat. "This is it for now. It's safe here."

At a little past nine a.m. they walked into the gift shop in the Inter-Tribal Council Building. The young woman who was cleaning the display case turned and smiled, then went back to her work. Jane waited until the woman sensed that she wanted to talk. She looked up from her work, let her eyes rest on Jane for a second, then said, "I'll bet you're here visiting relatives."

Mary smiled involuntarily.

"Yes," said Jane. She saw Mary's face turn to hers in surprise. "I was hoping to catch Martha McCutcheon here."

"Oh, Seneca," said the woman.

"That's right," said Jane. She held out her hand. "Jane Whitefield."

The woman took it and smiled. "Rowena Cloud. Ottawa."

"I'm very pleased to meet you," said Jane. "Is Martha in the back?"

"Martha hasn't been well this week," said Rowena Cloud. "She has arthritis bad in the winter, and it's been bitter cold for a couple of days, so she might be in bed. She didn't mention anything about going anyplace. If she's not home, though, come on back. You can stay at our house. I can give you directions, and the key is over the door."

"Well, thank you," said Jane warmly. "We'll go see if she's up to visitors."

As they walked down the street, Mary asked softly, "Are you really an Indian, or is that some kind of assumed identity too?"

Jane looked at her, amused. "Think I could fool her?" She opened the car door and waited while Mary eased into the seat, then started the car and pulled out onto the road.

"How did she know? You have blue eyes."

"This is Indian country. She's seen about every kind of Indian there is, so she's an expert. There are reservations all around us."

"Seneca?"

"Some. The Iroquois all lived in New York State in the beginning. But there were some Seneca and Cayuga families who used to go into Ohio every fall to hunt. After the Revolutionary War they didn't see any point in going home. They were on reservations at Lewistown and Sandusky until they got pushed out in 1831 and sent to Oklahoma."

"But this isn't your hometown?"

Jane shook her head. "Not me. My family stayed in New York." She watched Mary closely. "Look, Mary. There are going to be a few things you see and hear that won't make sense to you. Like that girl back there saying we could stay with her, when she had never laid eyes on us before."

"It did seem a little odd," said Mary.

"Smile a lot and ignore anything that seems unfamiliar. I didn't want to bring you here, but we've run about as far as we can for now. Barraclough already knows I killed his men, and pretty soon he'll know you took all his money and gave it to the government. He's going to be searching, and this time he won't let anything distract him. He wants us dead."

"I know that," said Mary.

"A few of the people here know me. Most of them don't. A few are - in the way that we figure these things, not the way you're used to - relatives. We need to get you to a doctor, and we need a place to rest. This is it."

They left the car parked on the road and walked along a path to the trailer park. It took Jane a few minutes of searching before she found the mobile home she remembered on the very edge of the lot. There was a small stenciled sign on the door that said "mccutcheon." She knocked quietly and listened.

The door of the mobile home opened and an old woman in a cardigan sweater and a flowered dress stood in the doorway three steps above them. Her long straight hair was thick and gray, tied back in a tight pony tail as though it belonged to a much younger woman, but her mouth was toothless and her jaws were clamped together so her chin nearly touched her nose. She said simply, "Hello."

Jane spoke to her in Seneca. "My name is Jane White-field, Grandmother. Do you remember me?"

The old woman squinted, smiled happily, then said in English, "Just a minute." She went away and came back with her false teeth in. "I remember you, Granddaughter," she said in Seneca. "I'm glad to see you again."

Jane said in English, "This is a friend of mine, Mary Perkins."

The old woman scrutinized Mary in mock disapproval. "Not another anthropologist."

"No," said Jane. "She's only a safecracker."

Martha laughed happily. "Dah-joh." She repeated it in English, stepping back to make way. "Come in. I'm having trouble with the lock on this door. Maybe you're the one to fix it."

Jane and Mary climbed the wooden steps into the tiny, neat kitchen. Mary could see that the television set was on in the living room, but Martha seemed to notice it at the same time. She reached into her sweater pocket, pulled out the remote control, aimed it carefully, and killed the machine. She said, "Sit down, sit down. I'll get you something."

Mary drew a breath to say "We just ate," but Jane touched her arm and gave her head a single shake.

Corn bread, honey, and strawberry and blueberry preserves appeared so suddenly and with so little preparation that Mary instantly perceived that this was another of the things that she must simply smile at and not question.

Jane and Martha walked out among the dry, frost-flecked flower stalks in the garden and spoke to one another in Seneca. "What happened to her?"

Jane had come here because it was the only place she could think of in this part of the country where she could trust people absolutely, but when the question came she could not relinquish her old habits. She quickly manufactured a story, but when she looked into the old lady's eyes to begin, they seemed already to have penetrated the lie. Telling it would be a waste of time. "She was kidnapped. She had money that wasn't hers. Some men wanted it. They tortured her. She hasn't said so yet, but they raped her."

"Did the police catch them?"

Jane shook her head. "We couldn't even call the police. She's done too much. She'd end up in jail and the men would find her there and make sure she never got out."

"What's a Nundawaono girl got to do with that kind of business?"

Jane looked into her eyes. "It's what I do. Fugitives come to me and I guide them out of the world."

"Why?"

Jane laughed a sad little chuckle. "Because if I didn't, they would give me bad dreams."

"I'll bet a lot of them do anyway," said Martha. She looked at Jane with her bright old eyes and shook her head. "People like me - the old longhouse people who believe in the visions of Handsome Lake - we're always saying the young have forgotten everything. So the one day I stay home from work my own great-grandmother comes to my door. I should learn to shut up. Now I have to help you take care of her, don't I?"

Jane said, "You're a clan mother. You must have learned enough in all those years to make a decision by yourself."

"Has she been to a doctor?"

"Not yet. I'm going to call a doctor friend of mine and have him use his connections to get us one who won't call the police when she walks in."

"I know one who will see her today. Leave her to me," said Martha.

A few days later, Mary opened the trailer door and walked outside to find Martha standing alone in the weeds. The old woman was already looking at her, as though she had been watching the door and waiting for it to open. "Come on," she said, and began to walk.

Mary Perkins caught up with her. "Where are we going?"

"No place. I've been walking like this for seventy-five years, and if I stop doing it, I'll stiffen up and die."

They walked along in silence for a time. Every few minutes Mary found that her steps had started to move toward the highway without her thinking about it, and she had to correct her course. Martha showed no interest in the road. She kept walking straight through the weeds. After a time Mary noticed that Martha's dress was hemmed precisely a half inch above the weeds so that it didn't get caught in brambles or pick up seeds. "How about you?" the old woman asked. "Have you decided yet?"

"Decided what?"

"To die."

Mary walked a long time. "I don't know. Sometimes I think it's already happened and I missed it. I don't know exactly when. I was beyond noticing things by the time Jane came. After that I concentrated on staying upright long enough to do something I had promised myself to do. That's over now, but nothing has come to take its place."

Martha walked along in the weeds. The cold made the dry stalks snap as her feet pushed them aside to touch the snow. "Each time I walk through here it's different. In four months this will all be wildflowers. Tiny white ones, lots of blue and gold and pink, all mixed together. There are about four hundred acres here that nobody has farmed since I was a kid, and the flowers grow like crazy."

"I'd like to see that," said Mary.

"Then you're not dead yet."

Mary walked stiffly, not paying much attention to the rattling stalks of the weeds. "Maybe that wasn't me. It's been so long since I used my real name that it doesn't sound like me anymore. Maybe Jane didn't tell you, but that's why this happened."

"Whatever you did, what was done to you wasn't the punishment. It was only something else that happened. Now something else will happen."

"That's my problem. It's not that I don't know what will happen, or that I'm afraid. I can't even think of anything that I would like to happen."

"Maybe you need some help. You could spend the rest of your life going to see psychiatrists."

"I take it you don't approve."

"It's okay with me. Some people like drugs, and I think a lot of them just like getting dressed up and having a place to go where they're expected at a certain time."

"Right now I can't see any difference between that and anything else that people do."

"Maybe Mary Perkins got so torn up that she isn't worth much anymore. Maybe you didn't like her much to begin with. Forgive her, because you know that she's suffered. Love her, because you traveled together and shared secrets. Then end her life and bury her."

"Kill myself?"

"Unless you still want to see the wildflowers."

Mary studied her carefully. "You made that up about the wildflowers, didn't you?"

Martha nodded. "Of course I did. This is all thistle and buffalo grass. I'd like to see some wildflowers, though.

Most winters I find that's all that's necessary."

Jane waited until Martha McCutcheon had gone to work at the store, then sat beside Mary on the steps of the trailer.

"I didn't ask you to talk much about what happened because I didn't want to upset you," Jane began. "Now I need to."

Mary's voice was tense, but she said, "Okay."

"They probably asked you a lot of questions - things that didn't seem to make any sense, right?"

"Yes. It was the older one, most of the time. It was like he was trying to see if I was telling the truth. Where did we meet the guy to get a ride in Ann Arbor? What did we eat - "

"Names," Jane interrupted. "Did he ask you about the names we used when we were running?"

"Well, yes." She seemed to sense she had made a terrible mistake. "I told them. I was so scared, so tired - "

"It's okay," Jane said. "It's okay. Just think back. Are there any names you know that you left out?"

"No."

Jane nodded and stood up. "You didn't do anything wrong. I just needed to know."

The "older one" must be Farrell. He had waited until she had reached the lowest point and then asked her all of the questions. The answers would have given Barraclough what he needed now. Barraclough could take something as trivial as the room number of a hotel on a particular date, approach the right clerk in the right way, and get the name Jane had used and her credit card number. If the hotel happened to be one that bought its security from Intercontinental, then they would give it to him without any fuss. Whenever Barraclough wanted to, he could be Intercontinental Security Services.

Jane spent the next few days watching the horizon. The flat, empty fields on all sides should have made her feel safer, but the endless sameness induced a panicky agoraphobia in her. She would sit at Martha McCutcheon's kitchen table for fifteen minutes at a time, staring into the west down the highway, then move to another window to gaze to the south across the winter-bare fields.

On the fourth night she heard a noise and sat up in bed, not waking up, just awake. From the other wall of the trailer Martha McCutcheon whispered, "It's the wind." After a moment she said in Seneca, "Have you thought about what you were going to do if it weren't?"

"Always," Jane whispered. She stood up, put on her coat, and walked outside the trailer into the field and away from the lights of the trailer park. She sat in the weeds in the dark and listened to the wind. It was cold and wild, coming across the plain in sputtering gusts and eddies. She had a scared feeling that it carried something that she couldn't quite hear. It might be something that she would have been able to identify if the air had been calm, and it might be something she should not have been near enough to hear at all, something the wind had brought from far away.

Either way it was the same sound. It was car doors slamming, men's feet trampling the stiff, frozen weeds, the metallic clicks as shotgun slides pumped and pistol magazines locked into place. She looked up into the sky and tried to discern the constellation of the loon that the old runners had used to navigate as they moved along the Waagwenneyu at night, but it was hidden behind trailing clouds.

When she looked back at the little camp, she could see it through Barraclough's eyes. It would not be hard to find the right trailer, with the shiny new car she had rented in Dallas parked beside it. Ordinary .38 ammunition would pierce the trailer wall. A rifle round in a big-game caliber could go through both walls and kill somebody behind the trailer from three hundred yards out. There was nothing in the flat, empty country that was big enough to hide a running woman.

In the morning Jane went with Martha on her walk. After a time, Martha said, "You're leaving today, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"You want something first, don't you?"

"It might not be safe here much longer. I want you to drive up north with her."

"Where?"

"Nundawaonoga." It was the Seneca word for the western half of New York State. It was like saying "Home." Jane added, "No planes, no buses, no credit cards." She held out a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. "This will pay for a car."

Martha walked along in silence for a time, then took the money and slipped it into the pocket of her jacket.

"There are people up there I haven't seen in ten years. They'll be very glad to see me."

"Thank you, Grandmother."

Martha held Jane in the corner of her eye. "Why aren't you going with us?"

Jane shook her head. "He's not looking for her now. He's looking for me."

29

Farrell paced back and forth in front of the television monitor, the heels of his polished shoes clicking on the old hardwood floor of the Enterprise Development office. "Take another look at her." The picture on the monitor was dim and grainy. The sound had been erased. The woman had been caught in a telephoto lens standing on the edge of a freeway beside Barraclough. Every few seconds a car or truck would flash past in the foreground, shrunk by the lens to look smaller than the people beyond it. The woman was Jane. "Look at the shape of her face, the way she moves. Forget her hair and clothes. She'll change those. Study the things that don't change."

After ten seconds, the picture vanished in a wash of bright, popping static, and then the tape began to rewind. Farrell turned to his audience of young men. They were sitting on desks, leaning against walls, some even crouched on the floor near the screen. Assembled like this, they were an unprepossessing bunch, but he knew something about each of them that made him feel confident. During his years as a cop, Farrell had become very good at spotting a certain kind of young man early. "This is the only picture we have of her at the moment, but when we find something that's a little clearer, we'll try to work up some still shots for you. Let's run the tape again."

As Farrell reached for the play button he could hear the heavy footsteps on the stairs. He straightened as the door swung open and Barraclough walked in. Few of Farrell's trainees had ever seen Barraclough before, but they had just watched the tape, so none of them wondered who he was. Barraclough's empty gray eyes swept the crowd of young men. When a few of the trainees fidgeted involuntarily to correct their posture, the motion seemed to attract Barraclough's gaze to them. He stared, made some secret assessment, and moved on.

The tailored navy blue blazer and gray pants Barraclough wore had the simplicity and precise lines of a uniform. He turned away from the young men, slipped off the coat and tossed it onto Farrell's desk as a simple gesture to make it clear that this place was his, and turned back to them in his starched, Marine-creased white shirt. Strapped under his left arm was a Browning nine-millimeter automatic in a worn shoulder holster, carried muzzle-upward so it could be drawn with little movement. Attached to the strap under the left arm was an extra ammunition clip. The young men could see that this was not the gleaming, compact sidearm of a successful security executive. It was the weapon of a man who had been in gunfights with people who were now dead.

Barraclough judged that his silence had served its purpose. "Mr. Farrell has probably told you a little about me, but we should know each other better. Let me begin by telling you what I'm not. I'm not your friend."

A few eyes that had been hovering in his general direction shot to his face but found no comfort or reassurance there. "If you bring me what I want, I will give you what you want. Simple as that. Mr. Farrell is not your Boy Scout leader. I haven't been spending money on training to make men out of you, as though I gave a shit if you lived or died. I don't. I'm giving you the knowledge and experience to be useful to me. If you want to make something out of yourself, keep your eyes and ears open and you probably can."

A few of the young men seemed to mine some hint of hope from the notion that they could make something of themselves. He appeared to want to oblige them. "I'll even tell you how the business works. If you win, you get to have the prizes - the girls, the big house, the cars, people calling you 'sir' for the rest of your life. If you lose, you're dead. You may still walk around for a while before one of the winners happens to notice you, but that's just a technicality. Whatever you have is his. You're a failure, a victim, a corpse."

Barraclough looked at them with his empty, unreadable eyes for a moment, then spoke again. "I know at least some of you must have noticed that a couple of guys didn't come back after this last trip. I'm here to tell you what happened to them. They're dead. Mr. Farrell and I left them to guard an unarmed, incapacitated prisoner, and they let the woman you saw on the tape sneak in and poison their breakfast." He shook his head in amazement and chuckled. "If she hadn't used enough poison, I would have had to kill them myself."

A few of the trainees exchanged nervous grins, but Barraclough's smile dissolved. "That's the other part of our deal: I will always tell you the truth. If you're stupid, you're a liability. You won't just hurt yourself, you'll hurt me. I am not going to let that happen. Not for them, not for you."

He glanced at Farrell, who was standing near the door. "Mr. Farrell is going to give you specific assignments over the next day or two. But here's the short version. That woman is all I want right now. When I get her, I want her breathing." He nodded to Farrell, picked up his coat, and slipped it on as he walked out the door.

Barraclough went down the back stairs and across the parking lot to the next street, where he had left his car, and began the long drive to the Intercontinental Security building in Irvine. He could not keep his mind off that Jane woman. He wanted to tear her head off with his hands. She had blundered into his way when he was at the edge of a triumph, and the collision had obliterated years of small, painfully won successes: years on the police force, always working harder than the others, taking more risks, gradually building a reputation; more years at Intercontinental Security, always working tirelessly, always looking for a way up.

After he had come to Intercontinental, Barraclough had focused his attention on each of the divisions in turn: Home Security, Retail Security, Detectives. Slowly he had brought each of them up to modern standards, and the management team in Chicago had responded by making him Director of Western Regional Operations. But Barraclough had not been working for a promotion. He had always lived by his ability to see farther down the path than anyone else, and he had already moved ahead of Intercontinental's management. All of his efforts to revitalize the old security company were mere sideshows - preparations for what was to happen in the little Van Nuys office of the separate corporation he had formed called Enterprise Development.

Barraclough had designed Enterprise Development to fit inside the skin of Intercontinental Security. Its costs were hidden within the giant company's overhead, its personnel culled from Intercontinental's applicant pool. When Enterprise Development conducted its business, a pretext was constructed so that the employees and equipment of Intercontinental's offices in twenty-six cities could be set to work identifying fingerprints, searching for cars, analyzing traces, performing surveillance.

Enterprise Development had been invented to specialize in exploiting a small and neglected group of criminals: the successful ones who had gotten away with large amounts of money. Some were already wanted by the authorities in the United States or elsewhere but were not actively hunted; others had not yet been discovered or were merely suspected. Some had been convicted and served sentences but had not made restitution. Barraclough used Enterprise Development to identify them, hunt them down, and turn them into cash.

In his first seven years of hunting, Barraclough had recovered over seventy-five million dollars. This had not been nearly enough, because the purpose of Enterprise Development was not merely to make its owner rich; it was a device for accumulating enough capital to buy control of Intercontinental Security.

Barraclough had made the next eighty million on only one find, the Timothy Phillips trust fund. Seven years ago he had decided that Intercontinental Security should obtain the Hoffen-Bayne account so that Enterprise Development could have a look at what was going on inside. He had not known about Timothy Phillips; he had simply realized that a company handling the personal fortunes of so many people was a good place to hunt. He had offered Intercontinental's services for a price that competitors could never match because the bid left no margin for a profit.

When he had placed security devices in the Hoffen-Bayne offices and the partners' homes, the customers had been interested in color and design, but circuitry had been beneath their notice. It had never occurred to people like Alan Turner that a little electronic box with glowing lights might be just about anything. It had never even crossed Turner's mind that if his security system had a little microphone he could talk into during an emergency, the microphone could also pick up what he said when there was no emergency. He had sat all day under security cameras and thought he was alone.

Once Barraclough had discovered the account Turner was stealing from, the money belonged to Barraclough. The man had been robbing clients for years, and all of the people who took salaries for catching thieves had missed him. Turner had been there for anyone to take, but only Barraclough had found him.

Barraclough had worked Mary Perkins with the same patience. Anybody could have read about her trial in the newspapers, as he had, but he had waited until the feds had taken their crack at her, and then he had taken his. The feds had come up empty, and Barraclough had walked away with fifty-two million.

His rage deepened. To have a woman like this Jane take it all away from him was more than an insult; it was a violation of the laws of the universe.

At ten o'clock in the evening, Farrell made his way across the polished marble lobby of the Intercontinental Security Services building, thinking about fate. Ten years ago, when he had been a cop for almost ten years and a detective for two, the captain had suddenly assigned him a new partner, a kid named Barraclough. After Farrell had watched him work for a few days, he had seen the future.

If Farrell kept on the way he was going, the best he could hope for was twenty years with the police department and a pension that wouldn't be enough to convince him that his life had been worth the effort. But ten years ago it was already apparent that Barraclough wasn't going to end up like that, and if Farrell stuck with him, he wasn't either. At thirty, Barraclough was entering his prime, and what he represented was a world that had no limits.

But tonight, as Farrell walked toward the elevator that would take him up to Barraclough's office, he was a little nervous. He had not been able to think of a way that this Jane woman could have found Mary Perkins except by following him to the farm. If he had figured this out, then Barraclough had too. No, he thought. He was not a little nervous. He knew Barraclough better than anyone alive, and he was deeply, agonizingly afraid. When he raised his hand to the elevator button, he saw it start to shake.

Farrell wasn't even sure what made him most afraid. A bullet in the back of the head had its attractions. It was quicker and kinder than most of the ways that lives ended. Slowly he identified what he feared most. He feared Barraclough's displeasure: not the bullet, but Barraclough's impulse to fire it, whether or not the trigger got pulled. This one lapse might have convinced Barraclough that Farrell wasn't like Barraclough - that he was just one of the others, a loser. After all these years, first teaching Barraclough and then following him, Farrell would be lost, abandoned and exiled from the light. He would be denied a share in Barraclough's future.

He stepped out of the elevator, walked to the big wooden door of Barraclough's office, and knocked quietly. No, that had been too quiet. Barraclough might think he was weak and used up, maybe even afraid. Fear disgusted Barraclough. Farrell gave a hard rap with his knuckles, then heard Barraclough call "Come in."

Farrell found him sitting behind the big desk. He only looked up long enough to verify who had come in the door, then went back to signing papers. He muttered, "The fucking home office is waiting on these reports. That's what they do. They sit in that building in Chicago and read quarterly reports. Talk to me."

"The lines are all in the water," said Farrell. "I finally got the last of the boys on their planes. With the ones we had out already, we should have two-man teams in fifty-six airports by morning."

"Are you sure they'll recognize her if they see her?"

"The ones who have seen her in person will. The tape from the freeway should help the others, but it's mostly on you." Farrell felt a chill. He had given in to some subconscious need to remind Barraclough that Farrell was not the only one who made mistakes. He tried to talk quickly, to get past it before the sour taste of it turned Barraclough against him. "But I've got people working on finding a decent picture of her from surveillance footage in the places we know she's been - stores, hotels, and so on."

Barraclough kept signing papers, then moving each one to a pile at the corner of his desk. He seemed to be listening, so Farrell went on. "I've got a couple of technicians traveling around with the teams trying to find her fingerprints where she touched something that might not have gotten wiped off: hotel bathrooms get scoured with cleanser, but prints might survive on a telephone receiver or on anything that was inside a drawer. Rental cars sometimes sit on the lot for a few days before they go out again. Fingerprints are still the best way to find out who you're really dealing with."

Barraclough frowned as he scrutinized a sheet that appeared to be covered with numbers, then wrote something on it and set it beside the pile of papers. He looked up, so Farrell said, "The credit checks on her fake credit cards come in once a day. So far she hasn't used any of them. I figure she's gone under somewhere to wait until Mary Perkins is healthy enough to travel again."

Barraclough looked down at his papers again. Something he was reading caused a look of weariness and impatience. "Is that it?"

Farrell said, "Just about. Of course I'm trying a couple of long shots. We know she met Mary Perkins in the L.A. County Jail. I hired a hooker to get herself inside and ask questions of the other prisoners, to get us a lead on where she lives."

"You said a couple. What else?"

Farrell gave an apologetic shrug. "Do you remember that guy who kept calling up bank tellers and saying he had their kid, so they'd leave money in a bag somewhere?"

"Sure," said Barraclough. "Ronny Prindle. That must be nine or ten years ago. What about him?"

"Well, there was something I tried that time that didn't pan out. I took one of the telephone tapes to a linguistics professor and asked him for an opinion of the accent. We caught Ronny Prindle before the report came back, but I remembered being surprised when I read it because the professor got it right. Prindle was from the east coast of Maryland. So I cleaned up the tape we had from Jane and sent it to the same guy. He thinks I'm still a cop."

Barraclough smiled at the paper he was signing, and Farrell thought he heard a chuckle. "Every time I can't imagine why I'm dragging your dead ass around with me, you surprise me, and I remember. Let me know as soon as you hear from him."

Farrell's hands stopped shaking. He had bought himself more time.

Two days later Farrell hurried across the same lobby, pushed the elevator button, and walked into the same office. Barraclough looked up at him expectantly.

"She's started using the credit cards," Farrell said. "We got a Katherine Webster at a hotel in Saint Louis, a Denise Hollinger renting a car in Cleveland, a Catherine Snowdon in Erie, Pennsylvania - "

"She's heading northeast," said Barraclough. "Start moving people into her path."

Farrell's eyes twinkled. "It's done. Everybody we've got is either up there already or on a plane to northern Pennsylvania or upstate New York. I've got some strung out in rest stops along the big highways, some checking the parking lots of hotels, restaurants, and malls for the car she rented, others waiting at rental offices for her to turn it in. I've got some more - "

Barraclough interrupted. "Can you tell from the reports what she's doing?"

Farrell scanned the credit reports in his hands. "Pretty much what Mary Perkins told us she does. She alternates identities, so the same person never turns up two places in a row. She's paying the single-room rate, and the meal charges don't seem to be enough for two, so she's probably traveling alone."

"But what's she trying to accomplish?" Barraclough snapped. "Where's she going?"

Farrell smiled. "Well, let me tell you what the professor says." He moved another sheet of paper to the top and stared at it. "She's got a little peculiarity. Her lips don't quite touch when she says m, b, or p. He thinks that means she grew up speaking two languages, but it's not enough to tell him what the other one is." He moved his finger down the paper. "Oh, here's the part I was looking for. Her accent has what he calls an 'intrusive schwa.' It's a marker that places her in a narrow linguistic belt that stretches from Chicago east as far as Syracuse, New York." He shrugged. "If I had to make a bet, I'd say she's had enough and is going home."

It was only twenty hours later that Farrell returned to Barraclough's office, looking exuberant. "She's been spotted."

"Where?"

"She turned in the rented car at the Buffalo airport, went to the long-term lot, got into a parked car, and drove off. We had two guys there."

Barraclough glowered, his eyes narrowing. "They let her get away?"

"No," Farrell answered quickly. "They followed her to a house in a little town on the Niagara River between Buffalo and Niagara Falls."

"And?" Barraclough asked impatiently.

"She put the car in the garage and opened the door with a key," said Farrell. "It must be her house."

30

Barraclough and Farrell arrived in the Buffalo airport after midnight in the beginning of a snowstorm. The Nissan Pathfinder four-wheel-drive vehicle with tinted windows that Barraclough had specified was waiting at the curb with one of Farrell's trainees behind the wheel, but Barraclough stepped into the street to the driver's side and said, "Get in the back."

Barraclough drove the Pathfinder out to the slush-covered gray street and watched the wiper sweep across the windshield to compress the snowflakes into a thin, ruler-straight bar, then slide back for more while the defroster melted the bar away.

Farrell inspected and loaded the two pistols his trainee had brought for them, attached the laser sights, and tested the night-vision spotter scope he had brought with him from California. "Where is she?"

"You get on the Thruway up here and take it west. Get off at the Delaware exit and head north."

Farrell glanced at Barraclough to be sure he had heard, then back at his trainee. "What's the place like?"

"It's a two-story house. We didn't see any sign of anybody else. She went to bed just before I left for the airport."

"You mean her lights went out," Farrell corrected. "Who's watching the house?"

"Mike. Mike Harris."

"From where?"

"He's in a black Dodge. He's parked down the street, facing away, where he can see in the mirror the front door and the door that goes to the driveway."

Farrell felt a slight, pleasurable warmth in his chest. The boys weren't much to begin with - just oversized balls and a mean streak - but by the time he was through with them they knew how the game was played.

When they arrived at the street, Barraclough stopped the Pathfinder a distance from the Dodge. Farrell took out the radios and handed one to the trainee. "You remember how to use one of these, right?"

"Press the button to talk, keep the volume low when anybody might hear it."

"Good," said Farrell. "We're Unit One, you're Unit Two. Anybody picks up the signal, he thinks we're cops. No chitchat over the air."

Barraclough picked up the night scope and turned it on, then swept it slowly up and down the street. Houses, trees, shrubs seemed to burn with a bright green phosphorescence, but there were no signs of movement. He aimed it through the rear window of the Pathfinder. "Is that the house back there on the left?"

"Yeah."

"You been around the other side to check for other exits?"

"Sure."

"Did you check the houses around it?"

"Yeah. Couples with kids on one side and the back, an old guy on the other. Curtains were open long enough so we saw people watching TV."

"Okay. Here's how it's going to be," said Barraclough. "Give Mike one of the radios and tell him to sit tight and watch. Then come back here and get ready to drive this vehicle. Farrell and I are going in. When we come out with her, pull up to the curb quick and pick us up. I want the burlap sack lying where I can reach it so we can get it over her head as soon as she's in the back."

The young man grunted his assent, then took the radio over to the black Dodge and got inside to talk to his partner.

Suddenly Barraclough hissed, "A light just went on.... She's coming out."

Farrell ducked his head below the window and spoke into his radio. "Heads down! She's out of the house."

Thirty seconds later Farrell heard a car door slam, an engine start, and the sound of tires on the wet pavement. He saw the red glow of taillights reflected on the dashboard. After a moment the glow receded.

Barraclough started the Pathfinder and pulled out into the street. Farrell said into the radio, "Change of plan. Unit Two, we're following. Stay behind us for now."

Barraclough swung the Pathfinder around the block and stopped with his lights off on the next street until he saw Jane's car pass under the street lamps of the intersection. The color was gray. It was an old Chevy - maybe a Caprice or Impala. "She's going too slow to be running." He waited another few seconds, glanced in the mirror to verify that Farrell's trainees had followed, and then started up after her.

"I'd sure like to know where she's going at this time of night," said Farrell. "She may have spotted the Dodge and decided to see if they'd follow her."

"I don't think so," said Barraclough. "If she had, she would have tried something like that while Mike was alone. If she saw him and us too, she'd have gone out the back window."

"Then what do you think she's doing?"

Barraclough shrugged. "She's been living like a scared rabbit for years. When she moves, it's nearly always at night. If I had to guess, I'd say she got a phone call."

"Mary Perkins?"

"Could be," said Barraclough. "But she might even be meeting new clients by now."

The gray car drove a few blocks, then turned left at the Niagara River. Barraclough waited for a long time before he turned after her. He had to be careful not to get stuck behind her at a traffic signal, where she would be able to get a good look through the rearview mirror.

When he could see her taillights far enough ahead, he gauged her speed and matched it. "She doesn't drive as though she's seen us. We'll wait until she gets to a dark, deserted stretch before we try to take her."

The road wound a bit to stay beside the big, dark river, then straightened and opened up into four lanes. Farrell unfolded the road map on his lap and checked it against street signs. After a few minutes he called the other vehicle on the radio. "Pull ahead of us now, Unit Two. We're going to fade into the background for a while. Give her lots of space and don't spook her."

The black Dodge followed Jane through little towns along the river, past a cluster of oil refineries, then onto the Thruway just before the Buffalo city line. Farrell studied the map, and as they approached each landmark, he would announce it. "There's a big park up ahead. Riverside Park. If she takes the exit, we might be able to pull her over there." She didn't. "Up ahead is the Peace Bridge over to Canada. That could be where she's heading." But it wasn't. The dark water beside them widened into Lake Erie.

Jane turned off the Thruway at Route 5 where it became Fuhrmann Boulevard and hugged the shoreline into the city of Lackawanna. Ahead of Farrell and Barraclough on their right loomed an enormous complex of old brick factory buildings behind a high chain-link fence. "What's that?" asked Barraclough.

"The map calls it the Gateway Metroport Industrial Center. It used to be one of the biggest steel mills in the world. I was here a couple of times in the early sixties, before it closed down. You couldn't breathe unless there was a strong west wind. It goes on like this for four or five miles." He stared through the high fence. "Looks like they're renting a couple of nooks and crannies of it to a few half-assed businesses now."

The radio crackled. "Unit One, this is Unit Two."

"Go ahead."

"We can't see her anymore."

Barraclough's head snapped to the right to stare at Farrell in intense concentration. "She must have made them."

Farrell spoke into the radio. "Is there any chance she just outran you?"

"No. We think she must have turned off on one of those little streets on the left."

"Then turn down the next one and circle - "

Barraclough snatched the radio out of Farrell's hand. "Negative. Cancel that. She didn't turn left, she turned right, or we would have seen her go across three lanes ourselves. Go back to where you saw her and look for railroad tracks."

Farrell held on as Barraclough swung the Pathfinder around on the icy street. What had Barraclough seen? They had been bumping over old railroad tracks for a long time. "You're thinking there's a way into the factory? But all the tracks lead smack into the fence."

"There has to be a line that goes in," said Barraclough. "They might have closed down the spurs that went to different parts of the plant, but to ship coal and ore in and steel out, there must be a regular railroad right-of-way. That doesn't go away just because something beside it stops making money. And they don't put a gate across it."

More than a mile back, Barraclough found the tracks. There was a functional-looking railroad-crossing light at a little rise just beyond a curve in the road. The big brick buildings on both sides of the boulevard would have obscured the view of her car just long enough for her to turn off her lights and coast up the tracks.

Barraclough turned the utility vehicle onto the railroad ties to straddle the tracks and slowly bumped along them. The tracks went only fifty yards into the dark shadow of the mill before they passed through a gap in the fence. "Here it is," said Barraclough. "She lives around here, remember? She's probably driven by here in daylight a hundred times." He wrenched the steering wheel to lurch off the tracks into the freight yard of the factory and waited until the black Dodge caught up.

Barraclough had already found her trail. The snow was clear and unmarked except for two deep parallel lines from a set of tires that ran deeper into the old steel mill. Barraclough trained his headlights on the tire tracks and sped up. He drove past a few small buildings in the complex that had new signs and recent paint on the doors, but as he went farther, immense brick buildings with dark windows loomed on both sides like the ruins of an abandoned city. He judged he had driven nearly a mile before he saw her car.

It was parked in the shadows on the lake side of a brick building, away from the distant lights of Fuhrmann Boulevard. Barraclough pulled to a stop when he was still a hundred feet away from it and let the Dodge pull up beside him. He said into the radio, "Watch the car and the doors of the building. We'll call when we need you." He handed the radio to Farrell and accepted the gear Farrell handed back: pistol, night-spotting scope, flashlight, nylon wrist restraints.

The two men stepped down from the Pathfinder and walked to Jane's car. Barraclough took off his glove to gauge the warmth of the hood of the car, then winked at Farrell happily. Then he studied the footprints leading from the driver's door. They led around the big building. Barraclough paused at the corner to draw his pistol, then quickly stepped beyond it.

He could see that the footprints led along the side of the building. He bent low to walk beside them, staying near the wall and keeping his head below the level of the windows. There were banks of thousands of little panes of glass along the side of the building, many of them broken and all of them opaque from at least thirty years of grime. The footprints led to a place where two of the panes had been hammered in and the frame had gone with them. "She must have heard us coming and gone in."

Barraclough looked ahead of him, but he could not see where the building ended. He stepped outward away from it to get a better view, then lifted the night scope to his eye, but he still could not see the end. The brick wall seemed to go on forever.

Farrell saw it too. "It's a big place. How do you want to work it?"

Barraclough peered cautiously through the broken window with the night scope, then pushed the switch to infrared. There was nothing nearby that gave off body heat. "We'll have to go in after her ourselves. We can't leave the cars unguarded, and if she can lose those two on an empty road, there's no telling what she'd do to them inside the dark building." He slipped the flashlight into one pocket, the wrist restraints into the other where he could reach them quickly. "When you see her, train your laser sight on her right away. She's not stupid; if she sees that bright red dot settle on her chest she'll forget about trying to outrun the bullet." He hoisted himself to the row of bricks that formed a sill below the missing windows, then squeezed himself inside.

When Farrell joined him inside the building, Barraclough drew his pistol again and turned on his night scope. They were in a huge, empty, unheated brick enclosure with a bare concrete floor, a fifty-foot ceiling, and a slight glow of stars above where panes of glass were missing. Barraclough turned his scope to the floor where Jane had entered. A few wet, snowy partial footprints led toward the other end of the cavernous room.

Barraclough walked beside the footprints, under an arch that was big enough for a truck to pass through, and beyond it into another high, empty room. To the right were a set of barn doors that must once have opened onto a loading dock.

They stalked through room after room. At each doorway they would pause, slip through the entrance low, and crouch a few yards apart around the corner. Barraclough would flick on his night scope, rapidly scan the space ahead for the shape of a woman, and only then venture to cross the open concrete floor. When they reached the end of the long building, they found a door open with snow just beginning to drift inside.

The footprints led to the door of another building. There was a half-rotted sheet of plywood on the ground that had once covered the empty upper panel of the door. Barraclough's heart was beating with excitement. They always made some mistake, and she had just made hers. She had gambled that she could drive into the enormous ruin of a factory, wait ten minutes, and then drive back up the river. Now she was alone on foot on a cold, snowy night. She was trying to hide in a complex that had been so thoroughly gutted that there wasn't anything to hide behind. She was running from two old cops who had been trapping fleeing suspects in dark buildings for half their lives. He would be able to see her in the scope as clearly as if she were in daylight, and she would be blind. Even the physical discomfort Barraclough felt as he entered the next building made him more eager. The air was frigid. The brick walls offered shelter from the bitter wind, but there was a chill trapped in the big spaces, and the icy concrete seemed to send a shock up his shins at each step. The cold would be much harder on her because she was alone and afraid. At some point she was going to come to a door she couldn't open, and he would have her. It was possible he would have to keep her alive for a month or two while she gave him what she owed him. She was a hunter's dream: a woman who had made at least ten years of fugitives vanish. There must be dozens by now, most of them still hiding wherever she had put them. And what kind of person had enough money to pay for that kind of service? Drug dealers, money launderers, second-toughest gangsters, big-time embezzlers. She had taken Mary Perkins away from him, but she might easily have ten more like her. He grinned as he walked through the darkened building; no doubt about it, she was the girl of his dreams.

Farrell stopped at the next doorway and turned to him, but didn't say anything.

"What is it?" Barraclough whispered eagerly. "Did you hear something?"

"No," Farrell whispered apologetically. "But we've been at this for over an hour."

Barraclough glanced at his watch. It was true.

Farrell said, "I think it might help if we brought the two boys into this. We might want to have at least one of them waiting for her at the other end."

Barraclough clenched his teeth to stifle his annoyance. He didn't want to wait for people to move into position - he wanted to finish this himself now - but Farrell was right. She had already led them too far to have any hope of getting back to her car. She was heading for the far end of the factory. "Give me the radio."

He took the radio and pressed the talk button. "Unit Two, this is Unit One." He listened to the faint crackle of static. He put the speaker against his ear but could detect no voice. "Come in, Unit Two." He looked at Farrell, letting a little of his impatience show.

Farrell said quickly, "It's got to be the buildings.

There's a hell of a lot of brick and steel between them and us. Let me try it outside."

Farrell trotted to the next loading dock, slipped the bolt, and pushed the big wooden door aside so he could stand out in the open air. "Unit Two, this is Unit One. Come in." He listened to the static. "Unit Two, come in." In spite of the temperature, he felt a wave of heat begin at the back of his neck and wash down his spine. He knew his two trainees were probably in the car listening to a radio they had turned off by mistake. He walked back into the building and shook his head. "Nothing."

Barraclough's voice was quiet and cold. "Go back for them. I'll be up ahead somewhere."

Farrell handed Barraclough the radio, then set off to retrace his steps through the factory. After four steps, he broke into a run.

As he heard Farrell's steps receding behind him, Barraclough started into the next big room and turned on his night-vision scope. This building was different from the last. The big row of square enclosures built into the side wall must have been furnaces. The cement of the floor had holes at the edges of big rectangles where heavy machines had once been anchored, and overhead were networks of steel beams that must have held chain hoists, and brackets for vanished devices he could only imagine now. This place must have seemed like hell once, he thought - deafening noise, unbearable heat from the open-hearth furnaces, molten slag running into big buckets. He stepped close to the row of furnaces and shone his flashlight into each one as he passed it. He moved through room after room, seeing few relics, only traces that were less comprehensible than the stones of some ancient city dug out of the ground.

After half an hour the radio in Barraclough's coat pocket squawked and startled him. Farrell's voice said, "Unit One, this is Unit Two."

Barraclough crouched against the wall so the noise would not make him vulnerable and kept his eyes ahead of him on the portal to the next room. He pushed the button and said quietly, "Go ahead."

"I'm at the car," said Farrell. "The reason they didn't answer is that they're dead."

"How?"

"It looks like they left the motor running to keep warm. There's a hose running from their own exhaust pipe right back into the cab through the taillight. Looks like she cut the hose from under the Pathfinder."

Barraclough tried to sort out the implications. "Are all the cars still there? Hers too?"

"Yeah," said Farrell. "I don't know how she got all the way back here past us, but - "

Barraclough gripped the talk button and shouted, "Then get out! She's still there!"

But Farrell had not released his button. Barraclough heard a swish of fabric as though Farrell were making a sudden movement, maybe whirling to see something. Whatever he saw made him voice an involuntary "Uh!"

Barraclough heard the report of the weapon over the radio. He had time to press his transmitter button and say "Farrell?" before the delayed reverberation reached his ears through the air. The sound was fainter this time, but without the speaker distortion he could tell it was the elongated blast of a shotgun.

Barraclough had already begun to put the radio into his pocket before he remembered there was nobody left to talk to. He hurled it into the darkness toward the corner of the big empty room. He was standing in a dark, icy labyrinth three thousand miles from home. The three men he had brought here with him were corpses. But the biggest change was what was standing between him and the cars. He didn't even know her real name, but he had thought he knew what she would do: she would run, and he would catch her.

He flicked on his flashlight and slowly began to walk away from the sound of the shotgun, his mind working feverishly. Where had the shotgun come from? She had not taken a shotgun off the body of either of the dead trainees, so she must have brought it with her. If she had, then she had known he was coming. This was not what he had expected at all.

Maybe she had not made a mistake and turned her car into the first place along the road that was big enough to hide it. It almost seemed as though she had been in this factory before. As Barraclough traced the logic backward, he began to feel more uneasy.

She had been shuffling credit cards and names for ten or twelve years. Why would she suddenly forget how it was done and take the chance of using accounts he might know about all the way to her own doorstep? Because that house in La Salle wasn't her own doorstep. He had not traced her to her hometown and right up to her house. She probably lived a thousand miles from here. He had followed her into an ambush - a killing ground.

Barraclough decided to run. The beam of his flashlight bobbed up and down wildly, making shadows that crouched in his path, then sprung upward to loom fifty feet tall. He had to remind himself over and over that there couldn't be anyone in front of him. What he had to worry about was behind him.

Was running the best thing to do? It was taking him farther away from the cars. But running made use of the only facts he could be sure of. He had heard the shotgun go off within a few feet of Farrell, so he knew where she was... no, he knew where she had been for the instant when she had pulled the trigger. His attempt to state it accurately invited doubts to creep into his mind, but he fought them off. She was half a mile behind him, he was sure. She had the shotgun in her hands, and she was walking through the dark line of empty rooms after him.

As he thought about her, a picture formed in his mind, and in the picture she was not walking. She had the shotgun in both hands across her chest, and she was running, taking long, loping strides. He increased his pace. The clapping of his boots echoed in the cavernous spaces and the rasp of his breath grew louder and louder. As he ran, he tried not to think about the shotgun. A double-aught load was twelve pellets, each the size of a .38 round. From across one of these big rooms they would hit in a pattern about twenty inches wide.

Barraclough calmed himself. All he had to do was keep her half a mile behind him and get out of this horrible place. As though a wish had been granted, his flashlight swept up and down the gray wooden surface of a door in the wall ahead of him. He dashed to it and tried the knob, but it spun in his hand without moving the catch. He pulled on it, but the door would not budge. He stepped back and ran his flashlight along the doorjamb. He could see a few puckered places in the wood where big nails had been driven in. He swept the flashlight's beam around him. The windows in this room were all twenty feet above him. When had that changed? Maybe the windows had been that way for the past half hour. He began to run back the way he had come. The windows in the next room were the same, and the room after that. But at the portal between the next two rooms he saw the doors of another loading dock.

Barraclough hurried to the doors, set his spotter scope on the floor, stuck the flashlight in his pocket, slipped the bolt, and tried to slide the door open. He strained against it, but it only wobbled a little on its track. He tried to remember: wasn't this what Farrell had done to open one of these doors? He turned on his flashlight again and ran it around the edges of the door until he spotted another bolt that went into the floor. He lifted it and pushed the door. When it slid open, he tried to feel happy, but the relief only reminded him how frightened he had been only seconds ago.

He stepped out onto the loading dock and jumped down into the snow. He felt a wrenching pain as his ankle turned under him and he fell across something hard and cold. He cursed himself. He had jumped onto railroad tracks. How could he have forgotten the railroad tracks? The loading docks didn't have flat paved surfaces for trucks; they were for loading steel onto freight cars.

Barraclough sat up and tentatively shifted some weight onto his ankle. It hurt, but he could tell it wasn't broken. He was grateful, glad to be alive. He wasn't going to be trapped; he could still make it. He slipped the pistol into his belt and walked to the left, toward the edge of the factory, the tall fence, and the street beyond. Then he saw Jane's car parked near the side of the next building. For an instant he struggled to fathom how he could have come out of the huge building right where he had started, but then understanding settled on him. She had not been running through the building at all. She had driven along the outside to wait for him here.

Barraclough hobbled toward the fence, gasping terror into his chest with each freezing breath. He threw himself against the high fence, clung to the links with both hands, and stepped up. He stretched his arm to clutch higher links, then tried to feel for a footing he could maintain with his injured ankle.

The blast of the shotgun slapped his left arm against the fence and deadened it. He was falling. His back slammed the ground hard and made him gulp air to reinflate his lungs. He tried to push himself up, but his mangled left arm would not respond, and he could see his dark, warm blood soaking into the snow. As he struggled to rise, it occurred to him that he had already heard the snick-chuff of the shotgun slide. "Stop!" he screamed. The weak, pleading sound of his own voice sickened him. He bent his legs under him, bobbed up, and turned to see her standing in the snow ten feet from him. She was only a dark, shadowy shape against the luminous snow. He waited for the roar of the shotgun, the splash of bright sparks, but they didn't come.

He gripped his injured arm with his right hand and pulled it painfully toward the center of his body. "Listen to me!" If he could just hide the right hand behind the left to get a grip on the pistol in his belt, he had a chance. "You need a way out of this as much as I do. The minute you helped your first felon to evade prosecution, you were meat on the hoof. Somebody - local cops, F.B.I. it doesn't matter who - was going to notice you and hunt you down." His fingers closed numbly on the pistol.

"Without a powerful friend, you're going to be somebody's dinner." He swung the pistol upward.

The shotgun blast blew through his chest. His body toppled backward to rattle the links of the fence, then lay still. "But not yours," said Jane. She turned and walked back through the snow to her car, put the shotgun in the trunk, and drove along the side of the building toward the gap in the fence.

31

Judge Kramer awoke from his dream. The house was dark, but the moon shone through the big magnolia tree outside his window, so small patches of gray-blue light fell on the bedspread. Something was wrong.

He heard the little voice and remembered that he had heard it in his dream and tried to ignore it. But it was all right. It was just the boy.

He swung his feet to the floor and walked out of the bedroom and down the hall to the guest room. He reminded himself that this was perfectly normal. A child who had seen what this one had was going to have night terrors. Kramer rubbed his eyes and struggled to wake up. He was going to have to be wise and strong and reliable. That was what this child needed right now. Adults came when you cried out in the night, and they told you everything was all right. If it wasn't all right, they damned well made it all right.

He stepped into the boy's room and said, "It's all right. Here I am, Timmy." He had barely uttered it when he realized he was wrong. The bed was empty. He looked around him. The boy was gone.

Kramer ran to the landing in time to see the triangular slice of moonlight appear on the floor of the foyer. The front door had opened. As he hurried down the first few stairs, he saw her step into the moonlight. "It's just me, Judge," said Jane Whitefield.

"What are you doing here?"

"I've come for Timmy."

"No," he said. He was shaking his head, but he knew she could not see it. "There are procedures for this. The law provides for it. You can't just..."

He could feel, not see, Jane Whitefield's eyes on him. "What does the law provide?" she asked.

"When it's safe, Children's Services will find him a suitable foster home."

"It's never going to be safe," said Jane. "Even if all the money is gone, there will be people who think more might turn up or who know how to get more just by using his name. Barraclough had a lot of people working on these side cases for him. They're still out there." She took a step with Timmy.

"You should know I have a gun." The judge reached into the pocket of his robe.

"So have I," Jane said. "I didn't bring mine either." She turned, took Timmy's hand, and then the slice of moonlight disappeared.

It was after midnight when Carey McKinnon turned his car onto the long gravel drive that ran up behind his old stone house in Amherst and parked his car in the carriage house that had, at some point in his grandfather's time, started being called "the garage." He swung the two doors closed and put the padlock on the hasp, not because anyone had ever tried to steal anything here but because the wind was cold tonight and by morning it would be strong enough to blow the old doors off their hinges if he didn't secure them. He had heard on the car radio that there was going to be another in the series of heavy snowstorms that had blown in, one after another, from the west, and he could already feel the cold front moving in.

Carey walked up the drive toward his house, looking down at his feet and trying to step in the spots where the snow had not drifted. He reached his front steps and stood under the eaves, stamping the snow off his shoes as he stuck his key into the lock, when he heard a car door slam. He looked over his shoulder at the street.

There was a person- - a woman - walking away from her car across his front yard: Jane.

He stepped across the lawn to meet her. "Hey, I know you!" he said. "What happened - did your flight get grounded?"

She smiled as they met, and he tried to get his arms around her, but the brown paper bag she was carrying was between them, so he snatched it away and put his arm around her waist. "No." She stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. "I'm home."

They walked together to his front door and he opened it. "Why didn't you call me? I'd have met you at the airport."

"Great idea, Carey," Jane said. "Then tomorrow while you were at work I could walk back there in a blizzard and get my car."

"Oh," he said. "Well, there must be some way that normal people do these things. I know some. I'll ask."

He flicked on the light and they stepped into the little old-fashioned entry. He set the bag on the bench, hung his coat on a hook, slipped hers off her shoulders and hung it beside his, then took her into his arms. They kissed in a slow, gentle, leisurely way, and then Jane put her hands on the sides of his face, held him a few inches away, and looked into his eyes. "You waiting for the wind to close the door?"

He shrugged, went to close the door, then came back and picked up the grocery bag. "Bring your laundry?"

She took the bag and pulled out a bottle of champagne. "There was a power failure in the store, so I thought this was Tabasco sauce. I figured you might be able to use it."

"A common mistake, but I can't launch the ship in this weather. Maybe we can drink it or something."

She reached into the bag again and pulled out a bouquet of white roses.

He looked at her for a moment, puzzled. Finally he said, "Oh, you brought my roses back. Thanks. It was getting to be about time, but I didn't want to say anything." He took the roses and sniffed them. "Held up pretty well, didn't they?"

"Remarkably," Jane said, but she barely got it out because he scooped her up and started to carry her toward the staircase.

He took her up the stairs, set her gently on the big bed, and began by taking off her shoes. He proceeded to undress her slowly. When he had finished, he sank down on the bed with her. He said quietly, "I love you, Jane," and before she could answer, his lips were on hers, and then by the time she could have spoken and remembered what she had wanted to say, words seemed unnecessary.

Hours later, Carey McKinnon awoke in his dark bedroom and moved his arm to touch her. She was gone. He stood up and walked down the hall. He found her downstairs, sitting on the couch in his big, thick bathrobe, looking away from him to stare at the fireplace. She looked tiny, like a child. He could tell she had heard him. "Hi, Carey," she said.

"What are you doing, figuring out how you're going to redecorate when your regime comes into power?"

"No. Come sit with me."

He walked down the stairs and sat beside her. He saw that she was not smiling. "What's wrong?"

She leaned over and kissed him, then said, "I've been thinking about your offer."

"You look like you've made up your mind."

"I have," she said. "One year from tonight, the tenth of January, you can set the date. If you'll give me some notice, I'll be there with something borrowed and something blue. If not, I'll just be there."

He grinned, but then his eyes began to look troubled. "Why a year from now? I mean, I guess what I want to say is, 'I'm happy. Ecstatic. I love you.' But what is there about it that takes so long? It's not as though we don't know each other."

Jane turned to face him. "I'm going to tell you a story. At the end of it, you'll say that you understand."

"I will?" he asked. "Then the year is to see if I really do understand. So it's that kind of story."

"I'm going to tell you about my trip."

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EPILOGUE

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In the spring of the year, as they had forever, Seneca women met at Tonawanda one evening at dusk to sing the Ohgiwe, the Dance for the Dead. Spring was the time when the dead came back. There were no drums, no rattles or flutes or bells, only the sad, beautiful voices of the women.

In the center of the big longhouse-shaped room, there were six lead singers who knew the ancient songs of the Ohgiwe best and had melodious voices strong enough to last through the night. They would sing the burden, and the women who danced along the walls of the longhouse would answer in chorus. Tonight the lead group included two who were not among the usual singers. One was Jane Whitefield, who had not been to Ohgiwe in some years, and the other was Martha McCutcheon, senior mother of the Wolf Clan in Oklahoma. She had been the one to sponsor Sarah Cartman in open council - not the Sarah Cartman everyone had known since birth, but the new Sarah, the one who had been adopted with her son, Timmy, in accordance with ancient practice.

The new Sarah Cartman danced along the wall in the circle with the other Nundawaono women. Six months ago she had been Mary Perkins. Six years ago she had called herself something else - maybe Stoddard or Stafford or Comstock - but she had done nothing under any of those names that she wanted to remember, so she did not think of them tonight. Instead, for a moment she anxiously wondered if she would be home in time to pack Timmy's lunch box for school tomorrow, then remembered that tomorrow was Sunday. When she had been Mary Perkins, she had neglected to develop the habits of mind that she considered necessary to a good mother, so sometimes she overcompensated. Still, she was becoming more comfortable as Sarah Cartman, and after a time she had even begun to feel safe. By then she already had a name, a job, a household to run, and a son to raise. Doing had made her Sarah Cartman; being was an afterthought. Through the long night, as her feet became accustomed to the dance steps and she repeated the words in the unfamiliar language, she began to forget that she had not always known them.

There were nearly a hundred other Nundawaono women, old grandmothers and young girls barely out of puberty, who danced for the dead on this night. Some wore modest spring dresses, as Sarah did. Others wore the traditional tunic, skirt, leggings, and moccasins, beaded and embroidered with all of the flowers that grew on the back of the great turtle that was the Seneca world. They wore them because women were the keepers and the source of life, the force that fought endlessly against the Being that is Faceless.

There were guests among the dead tonight too, and there were those in the longhouse who could feel their presence. The women sang the Ohgiwe for all of them together and for each in his own right. Some sang for the first Sarah Cartman, who had died in an automobile accident this winter at a young age. There was one who sang for Timmy Cartman's first parents, and for the couple who had taken him in and raised him. And she sang for Mona and Dennis, the lovers who had died in the fall.

The women sang the Ohgiwe and danced together as the grandmothers had, for the brave and the unselfish, for the protectors. They sang until dawn, when the spirits of the dead were satisfied and returned to their rest, where they would not be tempted to disturb the dreams of the living.

The End