Shadow Woman jw-3

by Thomas Perry

  “The structure might be that old. Of course, it’s been remodeled.”

  “When?”

  “Beats me. If contractors worked the way they do now, they probably started in 1850 and finished in 1950.”

  He flipped a second light switch up as he went, but when he reached the doorway into the dining room, he paused to let her get a head start. She lingered.

  He detected that she was looking toward the cabinets on the wall. He said, “Can I offer you a drink?”

  She pretended to decide, then smiled. “Sure. It’s a cinch I’m not driving.”

  “I don’t have a lot here, so we’ll have to rough it. Let’s see. Malt scotch. McCallan. Terrific stuff. Makes you want to strap on your claymore and march against the Duke of Cumberland. Vodka. It’s Stolichnaya, but I’ve run my Geiger counter over it to be sure it was made before the Chernobyl reactor went. Gin, of course. There’s also some vermouth if you’re good at making martinis. I’ve seen every James Bond movie, and mine still taste like poison. The usual mixers. Cognac. Wine and champagne in the refrigerator.”

  “Did you say champagne?”

  “I think I did.” He opened the refrigerator and found it. He set it on the counter and lingered over removing the foil and the wire. He would have to remember to buy another bottle. Jane would remember putting it in the refrigerator, and the missing champagne was not the best way to lead into telling her there had been a guest. He removed the cork, plucked two tulip glasses from the cupboard, and filled them.

  The sound of the telephone was jarring. He snatched the receiver off the hook on the wall. “Hello?”

  The operator said, “Will you accept a collect call from Jane?”

  “Yes I will,” he said.

  “Hi, Doc.” It was Jane.

  “Hi. I was hoping you’d call.” He looked at Susan as he said it, and she tactfully strolled off toward the dining room, then suddenly turned around and mouthed the word, “Bathroom?”

  He pointed through the living room at the far hallway, and she walked in that direction. He felt relieved. “Where are you?”

  Her voice was apologetic. “You know I can’t say.”

  “That isn’t what I wanted to know anyway,” he said. “I should have said ‘How.’ How are you?”

  “Tired of missing you. Tired of … all this.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear. When are you coming home?”

  He heard her sigh. “I just don’t know. I wish it were now. But I really don’t want to have to do this again. And I really don’t want to see this guy’s picture in a newspaper.”

  “Or yours, either.”

  “You know why I’m doing this,” she said. “Just put yourself in my place.”

  He craned his neck to look out the kitchen doorway and through the dining room. Susan wasn’t visible. “Just put yourself in mine.”

  Her voice sounded worried, pleading almost. “Please, Carey. This is an aberration. It’s the last time, a job that I thought was finished, and it wasn’t. As soon as I’ve got him tucked away, I’m done. We’ll start over again, from the beginning.”

  He was silent for a long time. “All right,” he said. “One last fling.”

  “See?” she said. “I knew I could get around you if I batted my eyelashes loud enough.”

  He knew it had been meant to be funny, an ironic comment on men and women that they were both supposed to laugh at, but he snorted mirthlessly. He tried to think of words that would take his mind off the worry and the emptiness he felt. He stared at the kitchen floor. “Well, I’m exhausted,” he said. “Tonight was the benefit for the children’s wing.”

  She gasped, and he began to wish he had not mentioned it. “It was?” Then she said, “At least I missed that. What a relief.” He knew he was supposed to laugh at that too, and he was sure he would have, if she were standing here in the kitchen, where he knew she was safe.

  “Yep,” he said. “You lucked out again.”

  “Did Marian Fleming ask about me?”

  “Of course,” he said. “So did a lot of other people. I told them you were in Morocco taking a belly-dancing course.”

  “Oh, no. I used that excuse last time. Now I’ll have to do penance with committee work for the next thirty years.”

  “Maybe not,” he said cheerfully. “But if you don’t know how to belly dance, you’re going to have to fake a hip injury.”

  Jane said, “I’ll work on it.” She said quietly, “I’d better go.”

  He said, “Do you have to?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Just let me know if you need anything.” He knew he had said it that way out of self-pity. She had never needed anything from him, and he was positive that she would never have asked if she had.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Me too.” He hung up the telephone and walked to the counter. He saw the champagne glass and it reminded him that he had a guest. He picked up the champagne and walked toward the living room, but she hadn’t reappeared. He set the champagne bottle on the mantel and stared into the fireplace.

  In the den off the bathroom, Linda heard the click and dialed the operator. “Can I have the time and charges on that call, please?”

  The operator said, “Two minutes and seventeen seconds, billed at three minutes. That’s four dollars and eighty-eight cents.”

  “For three minutes? That can’t be right.”

  “There’s a two ninety-five surcharge for an operator-assisted collect call, ma’am.”

  “Okay, but it wasn’t international or something. What are the night rates from Billings?”

  “That might be your mistake. The call wasn’t from Billings.”

  “That might be your mistake. She thinks she’s in Billings, and I’d bet on her. How could she be wrong about that?”

  “It was Salmon Prairie, Montana. It’s the same area code, but it’s a different calling zone, and the pay phone is owned by another carrier.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Linda. “My mistake after all. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” The voice was imperturbable, but chilly.

  Linda hung up and hurried down the hallway into the living room. She found Carey sitting on the couch looking at a magazine. He tossed it onto the coffee table. “Sorry. That was my wife.”

  “You didn’t tell her, did you?”

  “Tell her what?”

  “About me. Sister Mary Boniface.”

  It caught him by surprise. “Oops. You’re right. Forgot. Well, I’ll have to tell her tomorrow.” He had been wrenched from a sad contemplation of how close Jane had sounded, and how far away she was. Now he felt reluctant to let this stranger see that he was annoyed at himself for forgetting to tell Jane about her. He hated it when Jane called from a pay phone. It was impossible for a person to remember everything he had to say in a couple of minutes.

  “You aren’t going to tell her,” said Susan. The smile was mysterious and amused now.

  He was startled, and it irritated him. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because this was the time to tell her, and now you won’t be able to, because it will look as though you were hiding me.” The smile had a trace of sympathy now, the full lips pursed. Then there was mischief in the eyes. “If you try to tell her tomorrow, she’ll think that you didn’t tell her now because you were hoping to get lucky tonight.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “She’s not that way at all.”

  “That’s how women think,” she said. “You shouldn’t have decided to take one on full-time if you don’t know how they work.”

  He suspected that she would have seemed bright and witty at about eight o’clock, but right now, he was not in the mood to be the butt of any more feminine teasing. “Well, I’d better show you where your room is. It’s getting late.”

  She stood, but she took her glass with her and sipped from it as she headed for the stairs. “Just what I was thinking.”

  He led the way up the stairs
and turned right to take her down the hallway. “This is the best of the guest rooms,” he said. He flipped the light on and walked her into the room.

  She sat on the bed, bounced a little, looked at the walls, the curtains over the big window. “It’s very pretty.”

  He pointed to the door on the side wall. “Your bathroom is right there. Everything you need should be in the drawers—clean towels, shampoo, soap, even toothbrushes.”

  Susan glanced in that direction with little interest. She set her champagne glass on the nightstand, stood up, turned her back on him, and bent her neck forward. “Unzip me.”

  Carey stepped forward. He tried to lift her long hair out of the way without touching her neck, and carefully grasped the zipper without touching her back. He tugged the zipper down eight inches, to where he judged she could reach it, and stepped back. “There. If there’s anything you can’t find, I’ll be in the room at the other end of the hall. Good night.”

  He began his retreat, but she said, “Not so fast.” He stopped and turned. She was holding her hair up off her neck. “What do you think I am—a contortionist? I can’t reach that.”

  “Sorry.” He stepped forward, stopped three feet from her, reached out, and pulled the zipper down a few more inches. There was an instant—perhaps two seconds—when several things seemed to happen at once. She was still holding her hair up when she turned a little to say over her shoulder, “That’s more like it.” But her slight turn inside the dress seemed to spread the two unzipped sides of it apart. There was a tantalizing view of the white skin of the lower part of her back, where it softened and curved inward toward her hips. But worse, the front of the dress had nothing to hold it up. She quickly released her hair and hugged the dress to cover herself, but not before Carey had been presented with a glimpse of her left breast in profile.

  “Good night,” Carey muttered. As he backed quickly out the door and closed it, the last thing he saw was Susan Haynes facing him, holding the front of her dress up, her big green eyes looking into his with that knowing, amused stare. When he reached his own room at the end of the hall, he closed the door and leaned against it for a moment. The stare was still with him. “Taking her to a hotel wouldn’t have been such a bad idea,” he muttered. He locked his bedroom door, then undressed and got into bed. He lay in the dark with his eyes closed, but what he had seen came back to him again and again. “That,” he thought, “is what the end of a marriage looks like.”

  At three o’clock, he awoke, lying on the bed on his back. He imagined for a moment that he could feel Jane’s soft, silky hair on his arm. He turned to touch her, then remembered. He lay for a moment feeling sad and empty, and then he realized he could hear a voice. Someone was talking.

  Carey sat up quickly and looked around him, but he saw nothing. He switched on the lamp beside the bed and squinted against the searing light to see the door. It was still closed, and the room was empty. It must have been a dream. As he reached for the lamp, he heard the voice again. It had to be Susan Haynes. It didn’t seem possible that there could be somebody here with her. He got to his feet and walked into the hallway. As he reached the second-floor landing, he followed her voice and looked over the railing. She was facing away, sitting on the couch near the fireplace. The sight of her obliterated the lingering clouds of sleep. She appeared to be wearing only a bedsheet, her legs folded under her and her purse beside her. She turned to look up and the green eyes focused on him, and then she hung up the telephone.

  She put a plastic card back into her purse, fastened the white sheet under her arm, and stood up. As he looked at her from a distance like this, the thought that overwhelmed all others was her perfection—the long shiny hair, the smooth, white shoulders and arms, the graceful veiled curve of hip and thigh. When she turned toward him, he saw she was aware that he had been staring at her intently. In order to look up at him she tossed her hair in a gesture that should not have been intriguing because it was self-conscious and calculated, but it was mesmerizing because she was posing for him, trying to look more beautiful. “I was just calling my machine in San Francisco. I didn’t want to use the phone upstairs and wake you up. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I just wondered—”

  “Don’t worry, though. I used a credit card, so it won’t be printed on your phone bill.”

  He felt a sick chill. It had not occurred to him before that he had somehow become a man who was in the business of hiding evidence from his wife: first the champagne, and now the telephone bill.

  Susan seemed to forget about him for a moment. She hitched her shoulder uncomfortably, then did a poor job of retucking the bedsheet she was using as a sarong. She frowned, unwrapped a little of it, and tried again. It was as though she had unaccountably forgotten she was not alone. But then she abruptly looked up into his eyes, pretended to follow his line of sight and be surprised to find her own eyes looking down at the translucent sheet that covered her body. As she tucked the sheet under her arm she looked up again with the knowing, amused expression.

  “Something else on your mind?” The smile was still on her face as she moved up the stairs toward him. She walked so lightly that her feet seemed not to touch, as though she were floating.

  He shook his head, as much to clear it as to communicate with her. “No,” he said, already backing away. “No. I was afraid it was a burglar or something. But it was just you. See you in the morning.” As he walked back to his room and closed his door, he wondered why it was that virtue had to be so clumsy and inept.

  22

  Earl sat up and looked out his hotel window at Pete Hatcher’s car. He was through staring at its dusty finish, each day picking out new spots of birdshit on the windshield with his binoculars, never seeing a human being go near it. Now he needed to think ahead. He unfolded his road map and studied it, then picked up the telephone again and dialed.

  He heard the sleep in Lenny’s voice. “Yeah?”

  “It’s me,” said Earl. “Listen. I want you to close the place up and get on a plane right away. Get a suite at the Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, Montana. Stay there until I call. It could be two weeks, or the phone could be ringing when you walk in the door.”

  Earl could hear rustling noises and groaning. Lenny must be sitting up in bed. Lenny coughed to clear his throat. “The place already is closed up. I went to bed an hour ago. What’s up?”

  “Did you understand what I said? This isn’t a dream.”

  “Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, Montana. Wait there for you. Right.” Earl could almost hear him thinking. “Hey—Rusty and T-Bone. What do I do with the dogs?”

  “Bring them.”

  Earl hung up before Lenny could start protesting about the difficulty of flying dogs around. If people did it with fancy show dogs, then it certainly wouldn’t harm two big, muscular beasts like the Rottweilers, and he didn’t care what it did to Lenny.

  He walked into the bathroom and turned the water on cold, then stepped under the icy stream. He gasped, then slowly let the water warm up. He was fully awake now, confident that he was thinking clearly. It would take ten minutes to dress, pack, and clean his prints off everything he had touched. It might take another ten minutes to check out and get on the road.

  It had not escaped Earl that Linda had been talking in a whispery voice over the telephone at one in the morning. That was three A.M. in Buffalo. Linda would have called with Hatcher’s location as soon as she could—the first minute when she could reach a telephone. If she was with this Carey McKinnon at three o’clock in the morning, worried that he would overhear her, then there wasn’t much question what they were doing. She had been doing it with him for hours, letting him put it to her until he had used himself up and fallen asleep. This was not a simple flirtation where she got a fact out of him that he wouldn’t remember saying and probably didn’t even know was a secret. This was a full night of it, her hair probably wet with sweat and his sperm still dripping out of her, sticky
and warm when she called to tell Earl.

  He was enraged. He hated this man, and he felt a mixture of awe and disgust at Linda. She had said she would do anything to find Pete Hatcher. But what she had done was not brave or cunning. It was pathetic, requiring only a fawning sort of guile and a strong stomach. It was like biting the head off a chicken. She was soiled. Unclean. The only way he was ever going to feel right about this was to make it even. He was going to do the same to Jane Whitefield before he killed her. Then he was going to make Linda go back and watch him drop the hammer on Carey McKinnon. Maybe he would make her go back and do it herself.

  He stepped out of the shower, quickly dried himself, and dressed, tossing pieces of clothing into his suitcase as he saw them. Then he remembered the way she had cut him off at the end of the call—quickly, abruptly. It was probably because McKinnon was awake again. He nearly reeled with the sudden realization that it was worse, more humiliating than he had thought. McKinnon was awake. She would have put down the telephone and needed to distract him. She was doing him again right now, this second, while Earl was two thousand miles away in a hotel room. He didn’t dare close his eyes, because he knew that the sight of it was forming behind his eyelids.

  He slammed his suitcase shut, stepped to the door, and hurried out of the room. He took long, purposeful steps down the hallway toward the check-out counter. He was in a perfect mood to kill somebody.

  As Jane walked back to the hotel room along the road through Salmon Prairie, she considered whether she had succeeded in leaving the right kind of trail in the wrong direction. She had charged some plane tickets for flights out of Missoula and Helena to credit cards. The accounts were held by male identities that were unripe enough to attract the attention of a hunter who was using a computer network to search. She had made guaranteed reservations for hotels and rental cars in the destination cities so the charges would be recorded and would appear on credit reports.

  Her temptation was to use ten identities to build twenty trails in twenty directions. There was no reason to save false faces for fugitives anymore. This was her last trip. But two identities were the right number. If the chasers picked out both of them, they would think that one was an innocent who was not running from anything but didn’t have much of a history. But they couldn’t pick out one and ignore the other, so they would split up. If she left twenty trails, they would sense that she had made them all and wait.