Vanishing Act

22

Later that night, Jane didn’t agree to Jake’s proposal to move out of Harry’s apartment building. She just didn’t resist. She didn’t seem to care where her body was, just so there was no distraction while she stared at the opaque surfaces of walls and at the reflections in darkened windows. He picked out a small, cheap motel on Cabrillo Boulevard across the street from the ocean that he had discovered earlier that day. He parked the car and went inside while she sat motionless in the passenger seat. She walked into the room he rented, lay down on the bed, and closed her eyes. The next afternoon when Jake went out alone, she might have noticed that he had taken both of the shotguns with him, locked in the trunk of the car, but she didn’t show any interest in what he did or where he went.

When he came back and knocked on the door after the sun had set, she let him in. She didn’t ask where he had been. When she saw that he had brought dinner from a take-out fish restaurant, she sat down at the little table across from him and ate. When they were finished eating, as Jake stood up to take their two plates out to the trash bin in the parking lot, she looked up at him with a curious alertness.

"How good a friend is Dave Dormont?"

Jake was surprised to hear her voice after so many hours, and relieved to have a chance to talk to her, to be able to look at her and see her eyes. "A good friend," he said. "I’ve known him for close to sixty years."

"I want you to call him."

Jake felt a little uneasy, an intuition that her voice didn’t sound right. She didn’t sound like a young woman who knew she had gotten in too deep and was ready to turn the whole thing over to the police. Her eyes glittered as though there were something hot behind them. "I think that’s a good idea."

"It is," she said. "Call him at home. Tonight."

Jake smiled. "There are times when you have to step back and turn things over to the people who get paid for doing it." He waited for her to agree.

She didn’t appear to be listening. "Those men said he had been in jail. If he was, there would be a file. I want you to get it."

"A file? What kind of file?"

"Police have a system for sharing information about criminals. The federal government gives them money for a network called the N.C.I.C. Some of it is computerized, but that’s not what I want. I want a copy of his file from the prison at Marion, Illinois." She glanced over at the telephone expectantly.

Jake sat down at the table and studied her. "If Dave Dormont could get something like that, it would be privileged information. Why would he give it to me?"

"Because you pulled him out of Ellicott Creek fifty years ago," said Jane. She wasn’t smiling. "And you’ve spent the next fifty telling everybody in Deganawida what a great guy he is, and paid your tickets instead of asking him to fix them."

"What do you want to do with it?" said Jake.

She looked at him, and her eyes had not changed. They were still sharp and clear and unblinking. "I want to know who he really was—who did this to Harry and to a man you don’t know in Vancouver and to me. I have a right to know."

"I can’t argue with that," said Jake, warily. He looked up at her again. "It just doesn’t feel right." Then he added, "So I can’t ask Dave to do it."

"Okay," she said. She picked up the paper plates and plastic spoons, pushed them back into the bag, and headed for the door.

Jake could see the wall coming down between them. "I managed to get a full refund on those two shotguns," he said, watching her face.

She didn’t flinch. "I should think so," she said. "They’ve never been fired."

"And wait until you see the deal I got on the plane tickets back to Buffalo."

She seemed completely normal now. "How much?"

"Three twenty-two."

"Great," she said. She set down the plates, picked up her purse, sat down and wrote rapidly, then tore the check out of her wallet and handed it to him. "Thanks, Jake. Thanks for everything."

"You didn’t have to pay me back now," he said, staring at the check.

"It’s the best way to do things," she said as she stuffed the wallet back into her purse. "If I forgot, you’d get all uncomfortable about reminding me, wouldn’t you?"

"I don’t know," he admitted.

She walked to the door with the plates and garbage. "And don’t feel bad about the file. I’m not mad about it."

She stepped out the door and closed it behind her. Jake sat at the table and thought about it. He tried to tell himself it was right. Hell, he knew it was right. You didn’t leave a loaded shotgun lying around in the same room with a woman who had just learned that the man she thought she loved was using her so he could kill somebody. The file was the same thing as the shotguns.

Whatever she had planned to do with that fellow’s file, it wasn’t something that was good for her. He was lost in thought for a long time, and then it occurred to him that there was no rational reason for a woman not to have put down her purse before she took the plates out to the trash bin. He stood up and hurried to the door, but before he opened it he knew that she was gone.

Jane walked without hurrying. There were a lot of pedestrians out at this time of night in Santa Barbara, coming and going from the restaurants and movie theaters. She bought a copy of The Santa Barbara News-Press from a vending machine on State Street near the art museum and sat on the steps to read it in the light of the streetlamps. She could see after only a few minutes that there wasn’t much action in a town this size, but there were enough cases on the calendar to work.

She walked along State Street and turned right on Anapamu. The big white building on the right with its gigantic green lawns and patches of brilliant flowers had been a place that she had liked when she was here before, until she had learned that it was a courthouse. She climbed one of the outer staircases that ran along the wall and stepped into the second-floor hallway. The scuffed, uneven Mexican tiles and antique furniture along the walls outside the courtrooms made it all seem benevolent and pretty. She walked along the hall past the closed doors of the courtrooms and turned down the next hall. She read the names on the doors. Judge Joseph Gonzales, Judge David Rittenour, Judge Karen Susskind. She found a pay telephone at the end of the hall near the restrooms and looked up the number in the telephone book beneath it.

"Police department," said a male voice.

"This is Judge Karen Susskind," she said. "I’d like to speak to the watch commander, please."

"Yes, ma’am."

In a moment there was another voice. "Yes, Judge."

"I need some assistance right away."

"What can we do for you?"

She glanced at the newspaper. "I’m supposed to pass sentence on a gentleman named Richard Winton tomorrow morning at nine."

"Yes," he said. "I remember the case."

"Well, I’ve received some information that I need to have checked out as soon as possible. Nothing in this building is open, and I can’t reach the district attorney. All he could do is ask you, so I thought I’d ask you directly."

"You’re still at the courthouse?"

"Yes," she said in mild frustration. "I’m still studying the case."

"What sort of information do you need?"

"I just received an anonymous phone call here in my chambers. The person said that Mr. Winton isn’t who he claims to be. The person said his real name is James Michael Martin, and he’s not a first offender. This James Michael Martin was supposedly just released from the prison in Marion, Illinois, and he has a long record."

"Well, that’s something we can check," said the watch commander. "We can run Winton’s prints through the F.B.I., but it’ll take some time ..."

"I would appreciate it if you would make the request right away. But we can’t wait for the outcome. Find out if there is a file on this James Michael Martin in the prison, and get it faxed to you tonight. If it’s the same man, I’ll know it in a second, and I’ll have the information I need for the sentence."

"I’ll get on it right away," he said. "Do you want it delivered to your home?"

"Home?" she laughed. "I don’t expect to be home for hours. How long will it take?"

"Give us one hour," he said.

"All right. If I’m away from my desk for a minute, my assistant will be there. And if there are any delays, call me. I’ll give you the number of the private line in my chambers." She read him the number off the pay telephone, then hung up.

It took forty-two minutes before she heard the sound of a large man with heavy shoes and a lot of jangling metal on his belt come up the tiled staircase, taking the steps two at a time. She stood with her back to the big wooden door of the judge’s office so that the thick old-fashioned door frame would hide her, until she was sure he would see. She stepped forward into the hallway and saw the policeman coming. He was a motorcycle cop with high boots and a helmet under one arm. In his other hand he carried a thick manila envelope with a string tie to keep it shut.

She stepped back to the door and put her hand on the handle, then leaned forward as though she were opening the door a crack. "It’s here, Judge," she called, then trotted ahead to meet the policeman.

She pointed at the envelope. "Is that the Martin file?"

The cop said, "Yes, it is."

She snatched it out from under his arm. "Oh, thank you so much. Maybe I’ll get to go home tonight after all."

He grinned at her. "Glad to help." He turned and started to walk off as she hurried back toward the door of the judge’s office. While she walked, she listened for the click of the man’s boots to recede down the hallway. She made sure she didn’t reach the door until she heard them on the staircase.

A minute later, she heard the motorcycle start and then the whine of the engine as it sped down the block toward the station. There was only one more thing that had to happen. She considered not waiting for it, but she decided that a little patience was worth it. The pay telephone on the wall rang once and she snatched it up. "Judge Susskind."

It was the watch commander’s voice. "This is Lieutenant Garner at the Police Department, Judge. I was—"

"It’s not the same man," said Jane.

"So you don’t want Winton picked up and held for the fingerprint check?"

"Definitely not," she said. "It must have been some kind of practical joke. Whether it was on me or Mr. Winton, I couldn’t guess, but someone wanted me to delay sentencing." She added, "Thanks to you, we won’t have to do that. Goodbye."

She used the pay telephone one more time to call for a taxi, then walked down the outer staircase into the dark garden, past the beds of flowers that had closed their petals for the night and up the empty sidewalk toward the art museum to wait for it.

A few hours later, Jane sat in her room in the big hotel beside the Los Angeles airport and stared at the photographs in the file. There was John Felker staring into her eyes, only this time there was a black placard under his chin that had numbers on it. Then there was the one of his profile, the one she had lain next to in bed and studied in the light of the moon, thinking it looked like the head on a Roman coin, or the way Roman coins should have looked. Here it was, labeled with the same number on the same placard.

For a whole night in Santa Barbara she had considered all the ways it could be another mistake. The two men standing in the grave would have said anything to get out of it. Maybe the story made sense because they had anticipated that they would need to have a story to tell. As soon as she had formulated this idea, she had known it couldn’t be true, because the story they had told wouldn’t have done them any good at all with anyone in the world except Jane Whitefield.

The file had ended that. He was not John Felker. He was James Michael Martin, age thirty-eight, 7757213. He killed people for a living. The file was thick. There were all sorts of documents, from his arrest and trial record through his eight years in Marion. There was a note stating that he had a mechanical aptitude, but the prison counselor felt that vocational training was not an avenue worth exploring with this prisoner. He had gotten two fillings from the prison dentist, marked with a pencil on a diagram of numbered teeth. He had taken a class in bookkeeping and one in computer programming. He had been to the prison infirmary once—no, twice—for upper respiratory congestion, and received non-narcotic cold medicines. His general health was, each time, assessed as "excellent."

She set these sheets aside on the bed and pushed back farther in the file to the older entries. There was a summary of his record, provided at his entrance so that the prison officials would know whom they were dealing with. Five arrests, beginning at age eighteen, which could mean there had been more while he was a minor. Aggravated assault in Chicago; charges dropped twice. Manslaughter in Chicago; charges dropped. Suspicion of murder in St. Louis; released for lack of evidence.

Her eye caught something that made her stop because she wondered if she had imagined it. She went back and looked at it: arresting officer, John Felker. That was how he had known what to call himself. Martin had probably thought a lot about the man who had arrested him that time. He had known when the real Felker had retired from the police force, even learned his real Social Security number. This must have been the arrest that had made Martin seem important enough to watch, because the next arrest was the final one, for an illegal concealed weapon, something a cop wouldn’t know about unless he searched him. As Ron the gravedigger had said, it was something he probably would have gotten six months for unless the judge knew a lot about him and knew he had to swing hard because this was the last chance before somebody else died.

The Social Security number worried her. Martin probably hadn’t obtained it just to fool her. He might have gotten it because, of all the codes and serial numbers that a person collected in his life, it was the best one to have if you wanted to find him. It never changed, and it got attached to other things: credit cards, bank accounts, licenses. She wondered whether she should try to call the real John Felker to warn him. She looked at the telephone on the nightstand beside the bed, but she didn’t reach for it. She decided to wait. Martin might have learned what he could about Felker in order to harm him, but he wouldn’t be able to devote himself to that right now.

She moved to the back of the file. Born April 23. It gave her a special kind of twinge that she knew she wasn’t supposed to be feeling. They had been together on the Grand River reservation on his birthday. Somehow that made it more horrible, increasing the distance he had placed between them. She was ashamed of feeling that way, still. It was one thing to be surprised if somebody hit you in the dark; it was another to keep feeling surprised, over and over, as the blows kept coming.

Then she noticed his place of birth. Why had she assumed it would be St. Louis? She recognized that the trouble came from her clinging unconsciously to a wish that at least something he had said to her be true. She wanted to detect some point where he had wavered, maybe forgotten himself and actually talked to her without calculation. She wanted to believe that they had been, if only for one minute, nothing but a man and a woman lying in the dark, telling each other things. Everything he knew about St. Louis he had probably learned while earning that suspicion-of-murder arrest. The place of birth was, somehow, even worse than the birthday. He was from Lake Placid, New York.

She stood up and walked all the way to the door and then back to the wall, over and over as she explored the stinging sensation. Not only was everything he had said a lie, but he must have been listening to what she said and secretly thinking she was stupid, making her tell him where they were now and where they were going, and listening always without wanting to hear what she was saying but, instead, to be sure that she was still fooled. He had asked questions, made her talk about what she felt and about her family and her people, not because he was even morbidly curious, but because everyone knew that the best way to lie to someone was to make her do the talking.

She pushed aside the memories of Felker and forced herself to think about Martin. He had killed Harry over a week ago. He had just gotten out of prison after eight years, so any friends he might have had would not have been the sort he could trust. If he had gone to any of them, Cappadocia’s men would have seen it because they were following him. He could not have prepared an escape to the Caribbean or somewhere while he was sitting in a cell. It took papers even he couldn’t have collected in there without having somebody find out. What had he done? He had gotten out of jail and collected the money. Was that the whole payment in advance or just earnest money? It didn’t matter, because he was too cunning to expect that he could kill Harry and then go back to Chicago for the rest. Nobody could be certain if Harry ever knew who had killed Jerry C., but if John had gotten a pile of money from them, then he knew. He would be smart enough to see that once he killed Harry, he would be taking Harry’s place. Not Chicago, then. The partial payment was all he could expect to make on the deal.

She corrected herself. Even that was a wrong assumption. He had let her see money, and she was assuming that he had shown her all of it. All she could be sure of was that he would not go anywhere that she could figure out, in order to get more.

She walked to the window and stared out at the lights along the San Diego Freeway far below her. He wasn’t infallible. He had gotten caught a few times. She went back to the bed and studied the arrest summary again. Stopped for questioning by a surveillance team. Okay, you watch, then you arrest. So what? Maybe this meant something to the cops who were supposed to read it that it didn’t mean to her. But farther down the page was the reason the surveillance had been mentioned. He had been arrested in the company of Jerry Cappadocia. He hadn’t been under surveillance at all. Jerry Cappadocia had been. John ... James Michael Martin had been just a bodyguard or something. That was in the file to show what kind of connections he had. They didn’t want the judge to think he was just some ordinary jerk. He was a special jerk, with organized-crime buddies.

Jane stared across the room at the window and listened to a big plane rumbling down the runway. No, the story didn’t make sense. Cappadocia’s friends had been, even now, looking for Harry to make him talk, and to do that, they had to keep him alive as long as that kind of conversation took. But John Felker-slash-James Martin had been looking for him to kill him. And the guys in the grave, who worked for the Cappadocia family, didn’t talk about James Martin as a member of the team. He was just a guy you hired to kill people.

Then the thin surface she had been walking on, the one that assumed anything anybody said was true unless it was disproven, seemed to give way. She was suddenly on the other side of it in her mind, looking at it in reverse.

The police had assumed Martin was some kind of employee of Jerry Cappadocia. Certainly, he had known him. But there was more than one reason to be near Jerry Cappadocia with a gun.

It was like reversing a puzzle piece; suddenly, it fit. If Jerry Cappadocia had been in danger, he might hire a killer like Martin to protect him. If he did, was that all he would do? No. He would carry a gun too, or he would have some of his own people do it for him. The surveillance was on Jerry Cappadocia, so he was the one the police wanted, but they didn’t find a way to arrest him or any of his men, which meant that none of them was armed. Jerry Cappadocia hadn’t been in danger that night. Or he hadn’t thought he was. But maybe the one thing that had kept him alive was the police surveillance. Even though he must have seen Martin searched and the gun pulled out of his belt or pantleg or somewhere, Jerry still would not have suspected. To him, it must have been like watching the police discover that his dentist owned drill.

For the first time after all these years, she understood Harry. He had always claimed he had never seen anything at the poker game the night Jerry Cappadocia was murdered. But he had run anyway. He seemed to think nobody would ever believe he hadn’t seen anything, and maybe nobody would have. But that wasn’t the reason he had run. He had run because he had seen something and couldn’t tell anybody. And the only thing that made sense, that fit his sucker personality, was if what he saw convinced him that the one who had ordered the killing was his friend, the man who had kept him alive in prison.

When she thought about it that way, she even knew what Harry had seen. He had recognized the men that Martin had hired to kill Cappadocia. He had recognized them when nobody else had. They were strangers, outsiders. But Harry had seen them before. He had probably met them where Martin had met them—in prison. Martin was still inside, where nobody would suspect him. Nobody suspected him even now, after he had killed Harry.

When her eyes focused again she was looking at the bureau, where her purse lay open in front of the mirror. The money. Even that had been misinterpreted. He got out of prison and wandered around collecting money from banks, so everyone suspected some clients had deposited money in his name. Maybe that was where it had come from to begin with, but he had had it for eight years, long before he met Harry. In fact, there was probably less of it now, because he had paid his subcontractors to kill Cappadocia for him. Then, without warning, the rest of it came to her: Martin had put up the money, but he couldn’t have given it to them himself, because he was in jail.

Martin would have cooked up some convincing reason why good old Harry should go to some safe-deposit box or bank account or dig up a hole to get the money and give it to the two men. It would be compelling, and Harry would believe it, just as she would have. Then Harry saw the men one last time, kneeling over Cappadocia’s body to search the bloody clothes for poker money.

Now Jane knew the reason why Martin could kill Harry and not be afraid of the people who had paid him to do it: There were no such people. All anybody had paid him for was the death of Jerry Cappadocia. He had done it by farming out the contract. And the ones he had hired could never talk, because they had actually pulled the triggers and nothing they could say would ever keep them alive. He had nothing to fear from anyone except Harry.

So he had fooled the person who could lead him to Harry, made her take him on the same trip that Harry had taken. Maybe he had even let those four men see him in St. Louis, brought them along behind him as evidence to convince her that he was a victim. He had known they wouldn’t try to kill him until he had led them to Harry. She didn’t let herself turn away from any of the anguish of it now. She had insisted that his new name be John because she had known it would make him feel less strange and disoriented, and that would keep him from making mistakes. But he had been watching everything she did, and that had been the last bit of information he had needed from her. It told him that no matter what last name Harry had on Lew Feng’s list, he would still be called Harry. Even if all he could get from Lew Feng under torture was the list, he could still find Harry Kemple. He had cut Harry’s throat quietly, without a struggle, and let him bleed to death on that dirty shag carpet in the apartment in Santa Barbara.

Jane started to pace again. Another big plane took off on the nearest runway and she could feel a faint vibration under her feet, but she didn’t let it distract her. As she concentrated on the facts she had accumulated, she knew that they were beginning to assume their proper order at last. She tried to reconstruct the story in a logical sequence this time, to be sure she had the truth. The truth mattered. It had started with Harry. No, it had started nearly ten years ago, when she had met Alfred Strongbear on the reservation in Wyoming. That was the real beginning, because it happened first and it was what made everything else possible, even probable. Once she had saved someone like Alfred Strongbear, it was inevitable that she would meet someone like Harry. Alfred might not have had a heart attack on a cruise ship, but something someday would make him give a man like Harry her name and address.

Harry had remembered it the way he remembered the names of underrated racehorses that might one day make him some money. He had gotten caught at something a couple of years later. One of the two gravediggers had said it was fraud, but that didn’t really tell her anything, because most of the things Harry did could have been called fraud. In any case, he hadn’t run to her to avoid the arrest, so it must have come quickly and without warning. Then she realized that this might not be the reason why Harry hadn’t tried to hide. Harry was an optimist. Right up until the guards put his watch and wallet into the envelope and marched him off to get fitted for a uniform, he had been perfectly capable of believing he would get off somehow.

He was put into a maximum-security prison, not because he was dangerous, but because his accretion of minor arrests must have made him look worse than he was. His cellmate was a man named James Michael Martin. Harry was very lucky to draw a man like Martin as a cellmate in a violent place like that. The soft little gambler might as well have had VICTIM stenciled on the back of his shirt above the number, but Martin was a killer. Martin saved Harry’s life. He probably saved it daily, just by being there and letting other prisoners judge that he would rather have Harry to talk to than see his body hauled off in a bag. So Harry, who had no other way to thank Martin, had told him the story of the old man on the cruise ship and the name and address of Jane Whitefield, the woman who made people disappear. Coming from one career criminal to another, it probably had made a nice gift. She caught a glimpse of herself as she passed the mirror on the bureau, and the expression of intense anger startled her. She walked back to the bed and lay on her back to stare up at the ceiling.

After two years, Harry had gotten out of prison about as reformed as most prisoners. He had started his floating high-stakes poker game, sure that in another few years he would be a one-man portable Las Vegas. Harry had been so elated that he had gone to visit his old friend in Marion to tell him all about it. When Harry had run into trouble, with Jerry Cappadocia showing signs of moving in on the game, he had told Martin that, too.

She sensed that she was missing something important. Her muscles tensed and she sat up. What she was forgetting was Martin’s relationship with Jerry Cappadocia. Martin had been with Jerry C. the night of his arrest. They were acquaintances. He would have known that Cappadocia would be interested in Harry’s card game, so he made sure that he heard about it. She went over it again. Could even Martin have been capable of that much premeditation? Was he that good? As she questioned it, she felt a chill. Yes, he was. She had seen his work. He nurtured relationships with people and remained detached. He watched and waited and listened to them for as long as necessary, until he heard something that he could use.

Martin made sure that Jerry C. heard about the game, and then got himself into it. Now Martin had to find the proper instruments for killing him. He selected two prisoners he and Harry knew in Marion. Maybe they weren’t killers yet, but in Marion it wasn’t hard to find two men with faces that hadn’t been seen in Chicago and who were willing to learn to pull a trigger. They were about to get out. Maybe they already were out and he had recruited them earlier and told them to wait until he could arrange the right opportunity. It was impossible for her to know which it was, and she was concentrating on coaxing out tidbits she could be sure about. She was sure Martin would need to pay the two killers in advance.

Martin still had five years to go on his sentence. He couldn’t ask his two men to kill an important gangster and then wait five years until payday. He could easily have time added to his sentence, or even die before they saw a dime. They had recently gotten out of prison themselves, so they had no money. They would need some to disappear as soon as they had killed Jerry Cappadocia, and that could only mean that they would have to be paid in advance. Martin was in prison, so he needed a bag man on the outside.

It had to be someone he could trust to go and get some of the money wherever Martin had hidden it and give it to the two men. It also had to be someone who was not going to be around after Jerry Cappadocia was killed. The only possible choice was Harry. Martin probably told Harry that he was giving the two former prisoners money to invest in some criminal scheme— loan-sharking, bookmaking—some crime, anyway, or even Harry would have sensed an odd smell wafting past his nostrils. It didn’t matter what story Martin told him. It had been good enough. Harry gave the money to the two men he and Martin had met in prison.

Martin had the money for Harry to give them, because he too had been paid in advance. When the client had come to Martin two years earlier and hired him to kill Jerry Cappadocia, that had put Martin in the same position the two men were in now: He needed his whole payment in advance. The day after a man like Jerry C. was killed would not have been a good time for the killer to go to his client to get a pile of money. If the smallest detail went wrong, he would have to be running. Even if everything went perfectly, Jerry’s father still had a big organization that remained intact, and all of it would be diverted to finding out who was meeting with whom and who had any money he hadn’t had before.

So Harry got the money, gave it to the two men for his friend Martin, and went back to his floating poker game business. A week or so later, when Harry was inside the bathroom of the motel staring through the vent above the door, he recognized the two killers. If he recognized them, he would know that what they were doing was what he had paid them for, and come to the inescapable conclusion that Martin had intended them to kill him along with the others.

Harry had considered his options—telling the police or Jerry Cappadocia’s father, or even going back to Marion to tell his friend Martin that he would never talk—and decided that any of them would eventually get him killed. But he still had one more option hidden in his memory, and he used it. He ran to Deganawida, New York, and knocked on Jane Whitefield’s door.

She had hidden him for a time and then taken him across the continent to buy him a new identity from Lew Feng. Poor Lew Feng. Martin had tortured him for his list of names. Maybe Martin hadn’t been able to find the place in the shop where Feng kept it without doing that. She was reasonably sure that she could have. That he hadn’t even tried made him seem inhuman, completely devoid of emotion. But what seemed worse at the moment was that the torture had served a second purpose, and she suspected that that too had been taken into account. Even if Martin could have simply broken in, found the list on his own, deciphered it, and chosen the right Harry on it, he probably would not have done it that way. He was anticipating that it would have occurred to someone that the one who had taken the list was likely to be a person who had been to the shop before—a person who had known about the list because he was on it. Leaving Lew Feng’s body lying in the shop mutilated was a way of misleading everyone. The mind immediately fell into the assumption that the only person who would have needed to torture Feng for information was someone who had no other way to get it. The mind began conjuring up shadowy strangers to suspect—ones who had traced some fugitive to Feng’s door. Felker remained just another potential victim, like everyone else on the list.

She couldn’t hold her body still anymore. She stood up and walked to the window again to stare down at the endless stream of cars moving in both directions—white headlights on one side of the freeway, red taillights on the other. There were still a few blank spaces in the picture she had constructed. Martin had been paid in advance to kill Jerry Cappadocia. He had gotten himself arrested while he was stalking Jerry and gone to prison. He had waited over two years to hire a pair of substitutes to do it for him. Was Martin, then, an honorable murderer? Once he had accepted the contract and taken the money, did he feel he had to deliver? Maybe he did. Certainly, a professional killer who took money in advance and never fulfilled the contract would have a hard time getting work in the future from any potential customer who had heard about it.

She recognized that the important information was in the last words: who had heard about it. The person who hired Martin to kill Jerry Cappadocia was somebody who could tell other, potential customers. Then she made it more specific, and when she did, it felt even more likely. The client was somebody in the underworld, who not only could tell others but could signal his displeasure in a more vivid way than gossip. He was somebody who might get Martin killed. He had to be another gangster type, or Martin could have kept the money and forgotten about Jerry C. If the client hadn’t been somebody like that, why would he care about Jerry Cappadocia, and how would he have known that Martin was the one to hire to kill him? People like Martin didn’t advertise.

But if all of that was true, why hadn’t this underworld rival surfaced by now, five years after Jerry had been killed? He should have done what Mr. Cappadocia’s men had been expecting, what even Harry had predicted. He should have tried to take over.

She stepped back to the bed and bent over to look through the file again, page by page, until she found the list of people who had visited Martin in prison. The first visitor had come right after he had begun serving his sentence. It was Jerry Cappadocia. That must have been Jerry’s condolence visit. The second was Martin’s defense attorney, Alvin Berbin. There were three visits from him in the first few months, probably about an appeal of the conviction. Then, almost three years later, Harry Kemple came back to visit his old cellmate. She had not guessed wrong about that. He made four visits on successive weekends, just about a month before he showed up at her door. There were no more visitors in the next five years.

She straightened and tossed the file to the foot of the bed. She had been hoping for too much. The client wouldn’t be foolish enough to visit his hired killer in prison. There was nothing in the file to give her any way of finding out who had hired Martin to kill Cappadocia.

She concentrated on Martin again. Martin had served the five years that remained of his sentence, secure in the knowledge that most of his money was in the bank, Jerry was dead, his two stand-in killers were long gone, and nobody—not the police, not Mr. Cappadocia—had ever suspected him of being involved in Jerry’s murder. There was only one minor difficulty. His two shooters had carelessly left Harry Kemple alive.

She wondered if Harry had even remembered that he had told Martin in prison that the best way to start searching for him would be to visit a woman named Jane Whitefield. Of course he had remembered, but he also had remembered that it would be five years before Martin could come after him, and he had the police and Mr. Cappadocia to worry about that night. He certainly must have thought about Martin now and then during the five years in Santa Barbara. But at the end of them, he must have been confident that his troubles were behind him. Martin would have a hard time finding him, and why should he try? Harry had remained silent for five years. Harry, being Harry, must have decided that five years would be enough to convince James Martin that he would never talk.

Martin had not forgotten about Harry. He had collected the rest of his money and gone to her, and she took him to Lewis Feng, who pointed him to Harry in Santa Barbara, and that was the end of Harry. But what then? Martin wouldn’t have taken a plane out of Santa Barbara. That would have put him on a shortlist of people who had left the small town while Harry’s body was still warm. And if he left the Honda she had bought him in town, the police would begin to look for John Young.

He would drive out, and the place where he would go was a place he would know but that nobody in Chicago would. After a year in jail, that might be anywhere. After eight in jail and a fresh murder, he would go home.

She put the file into her flight bag and walked down the stairs to catch the shuttle to the airport. She didn’t mind waiting in the terminal for a flight to Syracuse. She could use the time to buy the next batch of newspapers and read.