Runner

34

Jane stood in Sharon's kitchen and fought the impulse to call Carey. After a few seconds she defeated the urge. If she told him she was calling because she might not be alive in a few hours, what would that accomplish? If she wasn't up to dying without tormenting him, then she had become a different person in five years. The only way to increase her chances of survival was to concentrate on what she had to do.

She went into the bedroom and laid out her black clothes and her running shoes, then went back to the kitchen table, checked the pair of Beretta M92 pistols, and loaded the two fourteen-round magazines. She took a shower, scrubbed in the bathtub, and then showered again to be sure she had washed off any trace of makeup, shampoo, or deodorant. She was going to be moving in the dark tonight, and she wasn't going to let a scent betray her.

Dressed in her black clothes, she returned to the kitchen for the small backpack and packed the kit she had devised for the evening. She had a spool of fifty-pound test monofilament fishing line, her razor-sharp folding knife, and the small plastic container of grease paint. She had bought a cell phone under the name Helen DeLong, and that was the one she placed in her kit. She had bought a battery-operated baby monitor and receiver and two thick chains with heavy padlocks.

Jane took her kit, her guns, and her bicycle to the garage and loaded them into the SUV. She knew she needed a safer place to hide her vehicle this time, so she drove to a hotel on the road to Rancho Santa Fe, rented a room, and parked in the parking structure where her SUV would not be visible. Then she put on her pack, took her bicycle out and rode it to the estate bordering the Beale house where she had climbed the wall on her earlier visit. She walked her bicycle into the oak woods off the road, left it in a dry creek bed, and covered it with leaves and fallen branches, then walked toward the Beale estate.

She came onto the estate by climbing the tree and using the overhanging limb she had used earlier. Before moving on, she found her half-stripped sapling and made sure it was in place in case she needed a ladder to reach the top of the wall again.

Once she had moved through the pine woods at the back of the Beale land, she crawled to the edge of the lawn to study the buildings. There was no sign that anyone was waiting. It was only three in the afternoon, nine hours early, but Jane wasn't sure yet that she was alone. She needed to reach the house without being seen. After she had waited an hour without hearing a sound from the house or seeing anyone pass a window, she decided it was time to move.

She stepped quietly along the back of the big garage, skirting the open lawn, and then walked to the back of the pool house. She didn't want to go any farther and leave the pool house behind her without first being sure no one had chosen it as the place to wait in ambush. She stepped to the doorway and peered inside, then slipped in and opened cabinets and drawers. She stared through each of the windows to determine what parts of the house and yard could be seen from there. She was almost ready to leave, when she opened the cabinet under the sink in the bar and found a gun. It was a .45 Glock, loaded, with a round in the chamber and the safety off. She took out the magazine, cleared the round, buried the magazine in the flower bed beside the pool house, and then returned the gun to its hiding place.

When she reached the side of the house, she stepped along it until she found the electric meter and circuit breakers. She could see the wheel in the meter turning very slowly, as though the only things still drawing current were the electric displays on the built-in appliances.

She opened her pack, took out her roll of monofilament fishing line, tied it to the master power switch beside the circuit box, and then ran it around a bar in the iron fence surrounding the pool, and finally along the side of the main house to the garden. She tested the line once by tugging it to turn off the power to the house, then went back to the box and closed the switch again.

The next step was to find a good way into the house. She approached the sliding door to the main room. Through the glass she examined the latch that locked it to the doorframe. She jiggled the door on its track. It was an expensive, well-fitted door: It wouldn't move from side to side. She tried grasping the handle and lifting the door straight up, and found that she could lift it nearly an inch. The wheels that held it on its track could be raised or lowered by adjustment screws recessed on the inner side of the door, and it was clear to her that nobody had adjusted them for years, so they had gotten very loose.

What she needed now was something she could use as a pry bar. There was nothing in the garden, but she remembered seeing a barbecue set in one of the drawers below the counter in the pool house. She went back and selected a big butcher knife. She returned to the sliding door, knelt, and lifted it again, pushed the knife into the space beneath it and moved it until she found the spring-loaded wheel under the door. She used the blade to hold the wheel up, and pushed the door off its track. Then she slipped the blade into the space she'd created between the door and frame, and lifted the latch. She lifted the door to set the wheel back onto its track, put the knife into her pack, and stepped inside.

She explored the interior of the house. The moving crew had taken everything that could be removed. The bare floors and walls made her footsteps echo as she went from room to room. On the ground floor there was a row of bedroom suites with bathrooms between them, and then at the end of the long hallway she came to one room that had a damaged wall.

The plaster had been dug away in two places under the window, as though someone had tried to burrow through the wall. Jane went to the window and looked out, then realized what it was. The holes in the wall were almost exactly in the places where the bars over the window were anchored. Somebody had been trying to remove the bars from the inside. Jane looked more closely and saw scratches on the plaster that looked like knife marks. These weren't part of some remodeling project. There were no drill holes or chiseled spots. Someone had tried to dig out of here with a knife—Christine.

It was obvious that Richard Beale had no intention of setting Christine free. The damaged plaster reminded Jane of the possibility that Christine was already dead. She might even be buried somewhere on this estate. She had been missing from her apartment in Minneapolis for about a month, and the plot of land around this house was huge. A girl like Christine, still weak from giving birth, would have been easy enough to kill, and then she could have been buried deep in one of the flower beds where the soil was soft and moist and free of stones and roots. They could have buried her and then transplanted a few flats of poppies and petunias over her. These were rich people. They could have had a crew plant a full-grown tree, or even cover Christine's body with a new section of driveway.

If Christine was dead, Jane knew, she would probably never find the body. San Diego had the Pacific Ocean to the west, and hundreds of miles of lonely deserts and mountains to the east. But she had seen the movers carrying a crib and boxes of toys. They wouldn't do that unless the baby was alive.

The second time through the house, Jane counted steps and judged angles, looking out windows to determine what could be seen and what couldn't from each of them. She studied the great room without its furniture, trying to detect hiding places. First she checked the inside of the fireplace, but found no guns. Then she checked the guest bathroom just off the big room, and found the second pistol. She unloaded it and taped it where she'd found it. She went into the garage, noticed a rope and a light stepladder, carried them out to two sections of the wall around the property that she had never visited, and hid them. She suspected that she might have to go over the wall again, and she wanted as many ways up and out as possible. Jane turned on the battery-operated baby monitor, climbed the shelves to the top of one of the built-in bookcases in the big room, and placed it there.

She took advantage of the waning daylight to study every part of the place. All the time while she worked, she was listening for the sound of someone else arriving. There was sparse traffic on the road beyond the high hedges. Each time she heard a car approach, she listened for the noise of the front gate opening. But there were only the calls of the birds in the surrounding groves of trees and an occasional flutter of leaves from a sudden warm gust off the desert. Jane unlocked several windows and two service doors on the wings of the house so she would be able to come in and out at will.

When everything was done, Jane went upstairs into the master bedroom, where she could see the grounds through windows on three sides. As she studied the estate, she picked out the places where Steve Demming might set up a sniper's nest to kill her, and calculated the angles from the house to the places where she could find the ladder and rope she'd left near the wall. She saw the hiding places she would have to check for enemies, and the false hiding places where a person would be more vulnerable rather than less: the low hedges near the house that would obscure a person but would make noise and reveal movement.

She waited, looked, and listened while the sun went down and the house gradually sunk into darkness. When it was eleven o'clock, she stood and put on her backpack, then looked out the windows again before she left the master bedroom. She went down the stairs at the center of the building and then walked from room to room in the dark, testing her memory of the distances and spaces. Then she went out to the garage and made her way across the broad brick pavement to the garden planted beside the front gate to hide the machinery that opened it. She sat down behind a tree near the gate.

At eleven-thirty the front gate began to glide to the left on its track. A black Cadillac Escalade drove in and stopped on the brick pavement in front of the garage where it was closest to the front door of the house. It was where Jane had expected the vehicle to park, shielded from the line of fire on three sides—the house, the garage, and the front hedge. Jane watched from her hiding place by the gate as car doors opened, lights went on, and people emerged. The driver was a man whom she had seen in New York. He had to be Demming. He was tall, had light hair, and an athletic body that had thickened a bit in middle age. He wore a short-sleeved polo shirt with a sport coat over it, presumably to hide a gun. He went to the front door, unlocked and opened it, and stood guard there while the second man joined him.

The second man was also tall. His hair was dark, and he had a handsome face, smooth and a bit boyish. He had to be Richard Beale. She could imagine Christine being attracted to him. He stood on the porch just in the doorway while Demming went inside, presumably to make sure Jane wasn't in there waiting. Beale looked increasingly uneasy as he waited for Demming to return. When he did, Beale stepped in.

Jane remained motionless and looked hard, waiting for the next two, who were sitting in the back seat. The left rear door opened and there was the one with black hair she had seen outside Lompoc prison. The woman got out, held the door, and waited for the other woman to get out, then grasped her arm and hurried her into the house.

For the few moments while the second woman was visible, Jane strained to see her clearly. Her height seemed to match Christine's. She looked about thirty pounds heavier than Christine had been when Jane had seen her, and that would be about right. The hair seemed to be the same style as Christine's. Was that exactly what it would look like four months later? The dress was one that Jane and Christine had picked out at the Mall of America in Minnesota. There wasn't enough time. In the few steps between the car and the house Jane couldn't tell if was Christine or it wasn't.

Jane waited until she saw a light go on in the big central room, then stepped to the front gate across the driveway, took out the padlock and chain she had brought, wrapped it around the gate and its post, and locked it shut. Then she kept going to the pedestrian gate nearby and locked that one, too. She moved around the garage toward the back yard, where she could see through the big glass wall into the lighted room.

The four people looked lost in the emptiness of the big room. They drifted around in it, like fish swimming the perimeter of a bare aquarium. Jane could see no weapons on any of them, but she assumed they were armed. She moved into position in the garden a dozen yards from the back of the house, turned on the baby monitor she had kept, and watched the people in the house react. They must have heard the click.

"What's that?"

"Do you hear that, too?"

"It sounds like static."

"Where's it coming from—the ceiling?"

Jane said, "It's me. I'm here. We're going to do this quickly. Christine?"

A man's voice jumped in right away to preempt anything the woman would say. "What do you want us to do?" Jane guessed that they had rehearsed this in advance, trying to make sure that Jane didn't hear the impostor's voice.

"Let Christine walk out the glass door at the back of the house and onto the lawn. The rest of you, stand in the center of the room and keep your hands above your heads."

She recognized Beale's voice from her telephone call. "What do we do?"

There was a whisper. "She can hear."

The woman who was supposed to be Christine walked to the sliding door.

"Wait." It was Demming's voice.

The woman didn't stop. She opened the sliding door and stepped into the darkness. She began to walk out into the yard away from the house. She stepped past the rock garden where Jane crouched and onto the lawn.

Jane switched the monitor off and the woman turned around and took a step toward her. "Stop there."

The woman moved her head from side to side, and Jane could tell the woman was trying to see her better. Jane crouched in the shadows a few yards from her. The light from the glass wall of the house was behind Jane and illuminated the woman's features.

Jane said, "You're Claudia Marshall, aren't you?"

"No. It's me—Christine. Don't you even recognize me?"

It was awful to hear her mimic Christine's voice. Jane could tell that the woman had heard Christine talk recently, probably a number of times. Jane said, "I want you to tell me what happened. Is Christine alive?"

"Sure I am." The woman stepped closer again, but she was drifting to Jane's left. Jane could see she was attempting to step out of the light and make Jane easier to see.

Jane said, "Stop."

Then everything around Jane seemed to be in motion. The woman wearing Christine's clothes lifted the dress and pulled out a pistol. She managed to raise it toward Jane before Jane shot her. The woman fell backward onto the grass, a red spot in the center of her chest.

Jane dived to her left away from the glass wall just as shots from inside shattered the pane behind her. Jane rolled once, turning her body to face the house, and fired six shots through the glass at the figures in the big, empty room. She saw Demming go down, but she wasn't sure whether he had been hit or simply dropped to deny her a target. Sybil Landreau swatted the switch by the front door to turn off the lights, and disappeared in the blackness.

Jane had spent the afternoon making decisions about what she was going to do, and she executed the moves that she had planned. She crawled a few feet toward the side of the house, picked up the fishing line, and jerked it so the power to the house was cut. Then she ran along the house to the first of the windows she had left unlatched. She turned on the battery-operated receiver for the baby monitor again.

The voices were stage whispers. "Don't worry. We'll find her, and then get you to the hospital."

"I'm shot through the thigh, Sybil. If I lie here, I'm going to bleed to death."

"Come on, Steve. Tie it off with your belt while we take care of this."

"At least help me move out of the center of the floor, so if she comes back I'll have a chance."

"You're not thinking clearly. You're right where you want to be. She'll think you're dead, and you'll shoot her."

"Listen, Sybil. I really need to go."

"Quiet. Both of you." This time it was Richard Beale's voice. Jane could hear him walking, each step like a hammer blow on the hardwood. There was a click, then another, and the click-click-click as he tried to turn on the outdoor floodlights. "Shit! She cut the power."

Jane switched off the monitor and left it beside the house while she pushed the window open. She used both hands to raise herself to the windowsill, then slithered inside onto the floor and closed the window. She could tell from the dimensions of the room that this was a bedroom. She remained where she was with her gun aimed at the door and waited. When she hadn't heard anything for a few minutes, she rose and stepped to the door. She crouched low and looked down the hallway toward the central room. She could make out the shape of Steve Demming on the floor. She saw no movement, but that meant nothing, because lying still was not only the strategy Sybil Landreau had urged him to follow, but it was also probably the best way to slow the bleeding from his thigh.

She waited, but still heard no movement in the hallway from Richard Beale or Sybil Landreau. She left the bedroom and moved along the wall toward the central room. She heard a click from somewhere behind her, turned toward it, and dropped to the floor.

The muzzle flash blinded her for a half-second and the report was incredibly loud in the bare hallway, but the shot went over her head and pounded into the wall. Jane fired a round at the flash, and then two others below it, but she didn't think she hit anything. The hallway was deserted. Sybil Landreau had fired and then ducked into the last room off the hall, the one with the bars on the window.

Jane made a quick decision. She pushed off the wall and sprinted up the hall toward the room. She dashed along the corridor as fast as she could, switching pistols as she ran. As she approached the final door, she extended her right arm ahead of her with her finger on the trigger.

She saw a faint sliver of moonlight appear on the floor of the dark hall, then widen. She stopped and went flat against the wall as the face of Sybil Landreau appeared.

Jane fired, but the face was pulled back. The door slammed, and Jane heard the lock bolt slide into its receptacle. Jane moved across the corridor to the other wall, took ten more steps quietly, and stopped just past the wooden door. The doorknob was on the right, the hinges on the left. Jane knew where Sybil Landreau would be standing at this instant. She would have her back to the wall, close to the hinge side of the door, waiting for Jane to kick it in.

Jane aimed her pistol two feet to the left of the door and about four feet up from the floor and fired three rapid shots into the wall. Then she moved a few feet to the end of the hall. There was no return fire, no sound of movement from inside the room. Jane waited for a minute, then two minutes. She took three steps, brought her right leg up, and gave the door a hard stomp-kick just below the doorknob.

The wood at the doorknob splintered, and the door flew open. Jane saw Sybil Landreau sitting beneath the window, and fired. Sybil Landreau dropped her weapon and toppled to the side, inhaling with a raspy whistle and exhaling with a bubbling sound, as though her lungs were filling with blood. Only then did Jane realize the woman had already been wounded by her shots through the wall. Jane stepped close and picked up the gun Sybil had dropped, then knelt over her. "Where's Christine?"

Sybil smiled, her eyes burning with a sudden intensity. "Dead."

"The baby?"

"Dead."

"Who killed her?"

"You did, bitch."

Jane stood and moved to the door, stepped out, and then closed the door behind her to keep the hallway dark. She still had one more person to hunt. She moved to the bedroom where she had entered the house, went back to the window, and looked out.

Richard Beale was still somewhere within the house and grounds, unhurt. The place where he could hide and control the most space that Jane might cross was out in the back yard, but she couldn't see him. Jane stayed where she was for a few minutes, staring out the window into the dark and carefully identifying each unmoving shape, but she saw no sign of him. She quietly stepped out into the hall again.

Jane silently approached the central room, but didn't go in. She knew that Demming had been lying there waiting for her to come within range of his gun. She came to the end of the hall and looked across the big room at him.

He was still lying in the center of the empty hardwood floor with his gun in his right hand. But now the pool of blood beside his leg had grown. His left hand was holding the end of a belt tightened around his leg above the wound.

Staying back in the shadows, Jane leaned into the room to try to spot Richard Beale. She heard the sound of a car engine starting outside.

Jane hurried back the way she had come, climbed out the window quickly, and dashed across the back lawn and around the far end of the garage. She saw the big black Escalade, then made out Richard Beale in the front seat. She ran along the garage behind the vehicle toward the blind spot on the passenger side. When she reached the back of the vehicle, he suddenly threw the Escalade into reverse and backed it toward her.

She dived to the side as the Escalade slammed against the garage door, bumping it inward and breaking the vehicle's left taillight. Jane stayed low and moved forward on the vehicle's right side, but Richard lowered the side windows and fired several wild pistol shots in her direction. Jane could tell some of his shots hit the inside of the car, the frame. Others splintered the front door of the house and broke a window somewhere behind Jane, but none of them were low enough to hit her.

Richard Beale shifted into drive. He was clearly not interested in chasing her down right now. He simply wanted to leave this place. He jerked the vehicle forward toward the front gate. Jane could tell he was pressing the remote control and waiting for the gate to open for him. The backup battery allowed the motor to engage, move the gate an inch or two until the padlock stopped it, and then begin to retract. Richard would press the button again, and it would move, stop, and reverse over and over.

Richard stopped the vehicle in front of the gate, jumped down from the driver's seat, and ran to the iron barrier. He stood there, half-hidden by the bulk of the black Escalade, tugged on the padlock, aimed his gun at it and fired a round, tugged it again, then ran to the smaller pedestrian gate, and found it padlocked, too.

Beale climbed back into his SUV, put it into reverse so he could swing it around, then backed it into the gate. The iron gate gave a musical sound as the chain snapped and the gate's wheels jumped off their track, but it didn't open. Jane moved toward the vehicle in the dark. Richard got out, stepped on the front bumper, walked over the hood to the roof of the SUV, and prepared to jump over the gate to the street.

Jane moved into position in the bushes a few yards from his vehicle, where she had hidden earlier. "Where is she, Richard?"

He turned toward her voice, trying to make out her shape in the darkness. "Sybil shot her. It was an accident. She was trying to get away. "

"Where's the baby?"

"It died when she did. This was all for nothing." He turned toward the gate again.

"Richard! Don't!"

He jumped from the roof of the SUV toward the pavement on the outside of the gate, and Jane fired two rounds. As he dropped, the muscles in his legs turned limp and unresisting. When he landed he collapsed and lay still beyond the gate.

Jane stepped to the small pedestrian gate, unlocked the padlock and took off the chain, slipped out to the street and knelt beside Richard. She felt his carotid artery, but could detect no pulse. She saw that the side of his head was wet, looked more closely, and realized that one of her shots had passed through his temple. She moved to his feet, bent and grasped his ankles, dragged him inside the gate, and left him hidden from the street by the tall hedge.

She looked back at the huge, dark house, and began to move to the area near the glass door at the back of the house. Claudia Marshall was lying on her back as she had last seen her. Her eyes were fixed, gazing sightless up at the sky, and her mouth had fallen open.

Jane stepped to the glass door and looked into the big room. Steve Demming was in exactly the same position as he had been in before. She quietly slid the door open and stepped into the hallway. She made her way down the hall to the room where she had left Sybil Landreau. She pushed the door open and stood back, but there was no sound or movement. Sybil was still lying on her side near the wall. Jane stepped in and touched the woman's throat, trying to find a pulse, but she was dead, too. Jane closed the door again and went up the hallway.

As Jane was walking across the living room toward the sliding door, she heard a sound. She whirled and aimed her gun at the man on the floor. "You're alive."

"Help me," said Steve Demming. His voice was strained and weak, but she could hear him.

"Toss your gun so you can't reach it."

He flipped his wrist and the gun slid a dozen feet on the bare floor. "Help me."

"You need to help me first."

"Get an ambulance. There are no phones in the house."

She understood. He had brought no phone because if he had made or received a call, it would prove where he was while Jane was being killed. "Tell me about Christine."

"I can tell you where she is."

"Her body?"

"No. That day, when she tried to get away, this house was already set up like a damned hospital. The Beales had brought a doctor from Mexico to deliver the baby, and a nurse to take care of it. They were still here a week later. And Ruby Beale is a nurse, too—retired. After Sybil shot Christine, they were all over her in five seconds. She's alive."