Vanishing Act

24

Martin was on his way into the back country, into the vast, empty spaces. The Adirondacks were enormous: almost eleven thousand square miles, some of it public park land, some private property, and dozens of towns. In that space, there were only eleven hundred miles of highways. Once he was off the paved roads, he could be anywhere in the six million acres that the federal government had decreed in 1894 would be "forever wild." She studied the map she had picked up at the hotel gift shop.

He had a fresh car with New York plates on it. He wouldn’t drive any farther east into Vermont or north into Canada over the St. Lawrence River, where he would be a foreigner again. He certainly wasn’t going south, where the country flattened out and the population centers began, and he wasn’t staying in the eastern part of the mountains, where most of the millions of visitors would start arriving as soon as the weather warmed up a little. He would backtrack now, go west on Route 3, the way he had come in, and back through Saranac toward Tupper Lake. From there he could go southwest for eighty miles without ever being closer to a settlement than twenty miles. Looking at the map, she was almost certain of it.

Before she left Lake Placid, she drove to Taylor Ford and spent ten minutes looking at a new Bronco. She paid very close attention to the oversize tires. Then she drove back along Route 3 toward Tupper Lake. There she spent a few hours wandering from one store to another, as she had in Lake Placid. This time she used the photograph she had taken of him instead of the mug shots. He had bought lots of groceries at Winwood’s Grocery Store, but the girl at the checkout counter didn’t remember much about them except that they were the sort of things men bought. Jane wasn’t sure what this meant until she had watched a few men come into the store. There were a lot of preserved foods, not many fresh vegetables or much perishable meat. They were provisions for people who didn’t want to come back to town for a long time.

It was nearly dark when she learned about the canoe. She walked into a boating store that called itself a marina, showed the picture, and the man at the counter recognized him instantly. Martin had been very particular about the canoe. It was fourteen feet long, built to be light "the way the Indians made ’em," with a very shallow draft. He had insisted on lifting the canoe and carrying it around in the parking lot before he would pay for it. That, the man told her, had been a sight, because it had been more canoe than he personally would have been happy carrying any distance on his head, but this guy could handle it and hold a horse under his left arm at the same time. He had set it up on the roof of the Bronco, strapped it down, and then paid cash.

Jane spent the rest of the day selecting her own provisions without returning to any of the stores she had visited. She bought her own canoe at a fancy outdoors-man’s store in Saranac Lake. It was only eight feet long and weighed forty pounds. She bought an axe, a survival knife with fishing gear in the hollow handle, and a backpack at a hardware store in Wawbeek. She bought the rifle in Veterans Camp. When this was done, she had reached her weight limit. There was no way to carry a sleeping bag or tent, so she picked up a light nylon tarp. That afternoon when she went back to her room in Saranac Lake, she opened the prison file again.

She read through the file searching for any piece of information that might help. She studied his medical records closely. There were no allergies, no old injuries that had left him with a weakness, no medicines he had to take, no deficiencies in his vision or hearing that would give her an edge. Ron the gravedigger had said something about his having killed another prisoner in Marion, but if it was true, there was nothing in his record about the fruitless investigation that must have followed, so she had no indication of how he had chosen to do it.

She turned to the report of his final arrest. He had been working when they had spotted him in the surveillance of Jerry Cappadocia, so maybe the report would give her a sense of how he behaved when he was planning to kill somebody. The place of the surveillance was 9949 Madison Street. He had been picked up outside a building called Dennaway’s. What was that? It sounded like a bar, or maybe a restaurant. She picked up the telephone and called long-distance information, then dialed the number they gave her.

"Dennaway’s," said a female voice.

"Hello," said Jane, forcing her voice into the cheerful, businesslike tone she had learned years before when she worked as a skip-tracer. "I’m calling from the Better Business Bureau, and I find we have a blank in our descriptive listing for Dennaway’s. Can you help?"

The woman hesitated. "Well, we have a little of everything, from Versace to Donna Karan."

It was a women’s clothing store. Martin had been planning to kill Jerry Cappadocia at a women’s clothing store. "I’m just drawing from memory here," said Jane, "but didn’t you have a men’s department at one time?"

"No, we’ve always been exclusively a ladies’ couturier."

Jerry Cappadocia must have been shopping for the girl, buying her presents. What was her name? Lenore Sanders. "I’ll make sure that we get it right. Thank you for your help."

"It’s a pleasure," crooned the woman. "Is there anything else I can tell you?"

Jane decided there was no reason not to push it as far as she could. Any bit of information she could change from a speculation into a fact was worth having. She made her voice go soft and confidential. ’’Well, if you’re not too busy, maybe we can clear this up right now. Do you have a regular customer named Lenore Sanders?" Unless Jerry Cappadocia was stupid, he would have tried to buy Lenore the clothes she might have chosen. He would go to the stores where she shopped.

"Let me look in the computer," said the woman. Jane didn’t feel hopeful. Five years was a long time. But after some audible clicking of keys and a pause, the woman said, "Oh, here she is. But I can’t imagine why she’d be writing to the Better Business Bureau about us. She hasn’t bought anything here lately."

"Oh?" said Jane with a hint of suspicion. "I can’t imagine that it isn’t the same person. It’s such a distinctive name. Do you have an address for her?"

"Oh," said the woman triumphantly. "I see the reason. She lives in St. Louis now. Lenore Sanders Cotton. Mrs. Robert Cotton, 5353 Dibbleton Way in St. Louis."

"That’s the one," said Jane. "But you say she hasn’t bought anything lately?"

"Not in almost a year. I guess she must stop in whenever she’s in town."

"Yes," said Jane. "That’s got to be right. She said she mailed something back to you that was damaged, and it wasn’t credited. What is your return policy?"

The woman sighed. "I’m afraid I know just what happened. The person who used to handle returns was ... Well, she’s no longer with us. So we’re undoubtedly guilty. What was the item?"

Jane took a guess. "It looks like a sweater."

The woman scanned the computer. "Yes. I see it. We’ll just send her another one."

"That sounds like a good idea. And I’ll tell you what. Since it was just one of those things and you’re going to the expense of fixing it, why don’t you just tell her it was a mistake you discovered yourself without talking to us? It’ll seem like a happy coincidence."

"Thank you so much," said the woman.

"You’re welcome," said Jane. "Goodbye."

She sat on the bed and thought about it. Lenore Sanders had managed to bounce back from the death of Jerry Cappadocia. She had left town and married somebody named Robert Cotton. Jane felt a strong curiosity about her that she couldn’t think of a way to justify. She certainly wasn’t going to find out anything about James Michael Martin from Lenore. The girlfriend hadn’t been present during the surveillance or she would have been mentioned in the report. She certainly wasn’t at the poker game the night Jerry was murdered.

Jane leafed through the pile of newspapers she had collected over the past few days, until she found the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was a morning paper, so they would be very busy right now. She scanned the bylines for a name that fit. It had to be somebody in one of the distant offices. She dialed the number she found on the editorial page.

"This is Ginny Surchow at the Washington bureau," she told the operator. "Can you connect me to research?"

There was only a second of delay before a woman answered, "Research."

"Hi," said Jane. "This is Ginny Surchow. I was wondering if you had anything for Mrs. Robert Cotton."

"Mrs. Robert Cotton? Yeah, some advice on choosing a husband."

Jane chuckled, not sure how funny that was. "Maybe I’d better start with him. Got a lot?"

"What haven’t we got? Come on down and take a look. We’ll be here until they put the paper to bed."

"I can’t come down. I’m in Washington. Just give me a quickie."

"All right," said the woman. "Give me a minute." After the minute was up, the woman returned. "I have an article here that has him being investigated for money laundering in ’seventy-nine, another one for receiving stolen goods in ’eighty-two. He owned the warehouse and he owned the truck, but the guys on the scene said they were moving the TV sets on their own. In ’eighty-five it was drugs, but he was nowhere near them and there was something wrong with the evidence, so the charge went away. By ’eighty-nine, we start running articles describing other people as ’having connections’ with Cotton."

"Anything really solid?" asked Jane.

"No recent convictions that I can see. So he’s described in the late ones as ’alleged organized crime figure.’ No, this last one has him promoted to ’suspected gang kingpin.’ "

"I get the picture," said Jane. "Thanks."

She hung up before the woman had a chance to ask her any questions. The whole exercise had been pointless. All she was doing now was filling in blank spaces in the story that didn’t need to be filled. Lenore Sanders had drifted out of the story entirely. She had gone off to another city and found herself a man who probably wasn’t noticeably different from Jerry Cappadocia. Jane knew all she was going to know about James Michael Martin.

She picked up the telephone again and called Jake Reinert.

"Janie?" he said. "Where are you?"

"I’m sorry I had to leave without you, Jake," she said. "I just wanted to spend some time alone. You understand."

"Where are you spending time alone?"

"The beach. It’s very restful here, and I was having such a good time that I started to feel guilty about you."

"Janie? Maybe you ought to come home."

She rapped on the table beside her bed. "Oh." She called over her shoulder, "I’ll be right there," then said, "I’ve got to go. It’s dinner time here. And no, it’s not a date, worse luck. It’s just another woman I met on the beach. ’Bye."

She turned in her key and left before dawn, driving along the perimeter of Tupper Lake slowly, stopping now and then to scan the shore. She drove up seven old logging roads before the sun came up without finding one that went farther than a few hundred yards. She knew it would be one of the old roads. From the time the Adirondacks had been surveyed, in the 1830s, until the government had decided to protect what was left of them, in the 1890s, logging had gone on unimpeded. After that it had been controlled in most of the park, but the roads were still visible in lots of places, even some of the old narrow-gauge railroad spurs that had been built to get the logs out. James Michael Martin had been born here, and he might even have picked out the one he would use while he was still sitting in his cell in Illinois.

It was after ten when Jane saw the tire tracks on the old road above the lake. The road was now only a set of ruts that started in the marshy land along the lake and turned up into the forest immediately. Down in the flats, the tracks from his new tires were deep, with black mud mushroomed out of the lozenge-shaped depressions even after three days. As the trail swung up and away they faded, soon only an impression of a big weight that had crushed the growth of thistle and milk-weed and goldenrod that had healed the ancient ruts. As the trail went higher, the ground was hard, with rocks close to the surface and a network of roots where the big trees on both sides intertwined. There were places here and there where the thick plastering of last fall’s leaves had been rotted black by standing water or washed away by spring rains, and then she could see the tire treads again. There was still the chance that even this early in the year, when the deep drifts of snow had barely melted from the high peaks above the lake, this might only be innocent fishermen trying to get to the fish while they were still eager and hungry.

The treads were the right pattern, but there might be hundreds of exact duplicates on pickups and jeeps all over the mountains. She drove on, bouncing her rented car over exposed roots and dipping into trenches where rain rivulets had rushed across the path toward the lake below.

At eleven she saw the first glint of light. It was sharp and piercing, a flash as though a chunk of the sun had fallen into the brush to the right of the road. She stopped the car, took her rifle, and walked the rest of the way off the path, stalking quietly along the carpet of wet leaves on the forest floor. When she was still thirty feet away, she stood still and stared at it.

The big black Bronco had been pulled off the path through some bushes and into a thicket of low thorny trees that formed a bower over the roof. She moved her head and saw the flash again and, this time, identified it. The rear window wasn’t curved like the rear window of a car, but broad and flat, and it caught the sun like a mirror.

She cautiously moved sideways until she could be sure that the cab was empty and the door locks pushed down. She walked up and touched the hood. It was warm, but the warmth was uniform from the baking of the sun, not a hot spot in the center because the engine had been running.

She peeked in the back window and saw that the truck was empty. James Michael Martin had not left anything at all inside. The food was gone, the clothes, the tent. The canoe was gone, and he hadn’t even left the straps he had used to tie it to the roof. It was odd that he had used the name John Young to buy the car. He had money, and he must have had some kind of identification that she hadn’t provided that said James Michael Martin. But then it occurred to her that after eight years in jail he didn’t have a valid driver’s license.

Jane went back to her rented car, slid her canoe off the roof, loaded all her gear into it, and dragged it into the deepest brush at the other side of the trail, then came back the same way, carefully pushing the plants upright and tossing leaves over the keel marks.

She had to back up nearly a quarter mile to find a place where she could turn her car around. She did it clumsily deliberately, breaking a lot of brush. If anyone later came this far, they would believe this was where she had stopped and gone back.

When she reached the road, she drove all the way back to Saranac Lake to turn the car in at the Hertz lot. Now she was on foot and unencumbered. It took three hours for the bus to get her back to the town of Tupper Lake and three more hours to walk around the lake and back along the logging road to the place where she had found the Bronco. As soon as she had made it off the road and taken the first two turns, the woods closed around her and no sound of civilization reached her ears.

People who lived in this part of the country didn’t use the word Adirondacks much; they called it the North Woods. It was just as well. The surveyor who had put the word on his maps had thought it was the name of a vanished tribe. What it really was was an Iroquois word meaning "bark eaters," the name they called the Algonquin. It meant hunters who couldn’t kill enough to eat.

This hadn’t been anybody’s territory in the old days. Huron, Algonquin, and Montagnais had come across the St. Lawrence to hunt big game here, and the Abnaki and Mahican had come across the Hudson and Lake Champlain. Mixed bands of all of the Hodenosaunee, including her own people, had also come up along the chain of lakes at the spine of the mountains to hunt. The Hodenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse, had never built their longhouses here. This country had been wilderness even to them, a place to hunt in parties of five or ten. They had built small temporary huts of bark and saplings, found the game, and then gone home to the south. Here the rocky peaks and high altitudes were too harsh for growing corn and beans and squash. Sometimes the snow in the winter was twenty feet deep.

Jane walked among the trees fifty feet from the path all the way into the forest, not so much to hide her trail as to foreclose the remote possibility of meeting Martin alone and unarmed. The trees here were all second growth, sprouted since the lumber had been cut away in the old days, and it had grown in thick. The trees that would ultimately grow tall and form a canopy were not yet old enough to shade the others and make them die out.

The sun was just beginning to move behind the tops of the mountains to the west when she found the Bronco again. She could see that she had been lucky to find it the first time. He had hidden it well, but he must have done it in the afternoon, when the sun would have fallen on the convex windshield and been dispersed and not on the flat tailgate window.

Jane stood and studied the Bronco. It still bothered her that he had bought it as John Young. The Department of Motor Vehicles had a record of the sale, so it was public information. She thought about Martin, not John Felker, because he had never been, or about John Young, because he had just been her version of the same person. Martin hadn’t come up here to stay. He had come back to the mountains to wait. He had killed Harry, and now Jerry Cappadocia’s father would be sending people out to look for him.

He had very little to worry about. He had killed Lew Feng, the person who had constructed John Young. He would be waiting for the news about Harry to come out and circulate to all of the people who might care and then to get stale. Jane supposed he had thought she would never figure out that he had killed Harry; she would assume that the four men had killed Lew Feng, gotten the list, and killed Harry. Now nobody had a way to find out about John Young because Lew Feng was dead.

She thought about the last night in Vancouver, and the truth settled on her slowly. She had thought he was upset because she had parted with him so abruptly. By the time he had known she was going, she was already on her way to the airport. But what he had really been upset about was that she had left him no safe way to kill her. She had slipped away. Now he was here waiting to see whether she had stayed fooled. If she had, there was no way for anyone to find him. But what if she hadn’t?

She looked at the Bronco closely. There was nothing visible. She went to the ground, slithered between the big wheels, and looked up at the undercarriage. There was nothing out of place that she could see. She slowly pulled herself toward the front of the car looking for wires, or maybe a pipe that didn’t look as though it belonged. When she saw the two plastic water bottles, she eased herself closer. There was duct tape around the tops. She touched one of them and brought the smell of gasoline away on her finger. The two bottles were tied against the exhaust manifold. She could have hot-wired the car and driven it a mile or two up the trail before the plastic melted and dumped a couple of gallons of gasoline all over the engine compartment.

If she had gotten out before the fire burned along the freshly greased underside and reached the gas tank, people in town would have seen the smoke and come to find her running away from John Young’s car. He had known that in order to find the car at all, she would need to ask a lot of people if they had seen John Young. When John Young didn’t come out of the woods after weeks, they might not be able to prove that she had killed him, but they would certainly suspect it.

Either way, she couldn’t win and he couldn’t lose. If the car burned, there would be nothing left of her or the two plastic one-gallon bottles. John Young would go back to being James Michael Martin. If it didn’t burn, then it would mean he could be John Young forever, because she hadn’t come for him. She might not have been able to imagine that John Felker could have killed Harry, or she might have gone to Medford and found that he had never made it there, and believe for the rest of her life that the four men had caught him. She rolled out from under the vehicle and sat beside it. She could feel the malevolence exuding from it now. A person would have to feel a vast distance between himself and anyone he planned to burn to death.

She wasn’t looking at the work of someone who was scared, a panicky person trying desperately to throw barriers between himself and retribution. He had gone over entirely. No, that was wrong; before she had even met him he had been enlisted on the other side. He had come to her for one reason only, pretending to be an innocent victim so that he could find a man who thought he was a friend and cut his throat. She stared at the big black vehicle to let it burn the last of her feelings for John Felker away. As the sun disappeared over the top of the mountains, the Bronco seemed to grow like a shadow.

Jane rolled back under it. She had only a half hour of light left after sunset and a lot to do. She opened the hood of the Bronco by reaching up from underneath to pull the cable to release the latch. She left the two bottles undisturbed. Instead, she unhooked the two battery cables and buried them at the foot of a bush ten paces away.

Then she found her canoe, dragged it to the edge of the water, and knelt beside it to check her equipment. She spent some time getting used to the rifle. The first one she had found that was suitable was a Winchester 70 XTR Standard 30-06 bolt action. It held five shots, and the receiver was tapped for scope mounts. It was heavy, seven and a half pounds without the Weaver K4 scope. The man at the store had told her that her husband would be very pleased.

She loaded the magazine and set the rifle on top of the nylon tarp in the hull in front of her seat and wrapped it once to keep it from catching drops from her paddle blade when she changed sides. Then she distributed the weight of the rest of her possessions as evenly as possible. She spent a few minutes staring out across big Tupper Lake to memorize the shape and took compass readings to help her find the outlet at the other end.

When the lake was obsidian-black and glassy, Jane pushed her little canoe into the shallows among the reeds, settled her weight into it, and began to paddle. She moved the canoe steadily along the quiet, calm water. She set the compass down on the hull in front of her and moved out from the shore to where she could see any flicker of light in the woods above it. The darkness was comforting now because she knew that somewhere deep in the forest, a man who had embraced the left-handed twin, the Evil-minded, was waiting for her.