Poison Flower

by Thomas Perry

  "Yes."

  "I just killed eight of them. If there are others who might know you helped me, be ready."

  "I'm pretty sure there aren't. I got the impression they were one little expedition after a reward. They wouldn't have passed on a tip to anybody. But thanks for the warning. You all right"

  "I'm the only happy person for a few miles in any direction."

  "Good enough. See you."

  "See you."

  Jane went upstairs and took the blanket off the bed where she had slept. She rolled one of the bodies off the porch onto the blanket and used it to drag him to the pit. She carried the blanket back and rolled the next one onto it. She worked hard and tirelessly. She had decided to do as much of this work as she could tonight, while it was cool and the bodies were fresh, and it was dark and she didn't have to look at their eyes. By the fourth body the blanket was soaked with blood. It didn't matter, she thought. The men were just bleeding into the grass. The ground of the state of New York, the country her people called their longhouse, had been soaking up human blood nicely for about fourteen thousand years.

  When she had all seven bodies at the pit, she went through each man's pockets, dumped the contents onto a growing pile on the grass, then rolled him into the pit. When she had rolled the last one in, she lay back in the weeds and stared up at the dark sky. Clouds were coming in, and she knew that later on, there would be enough to snuff out the stars. After a long time, she got up, put the men's belongings into one man's ammo bag, and carried them to the house. She turned on the porch light and read the names on the licenses and credit cards. Wylie had not been lying-none of them was Daniel Martel.

  She found the spade, then began to fill the pit. It was hard work. She took her jacket off and shoveled, letting the sweat pour off her, and soak the spine and armpits of her T-shirt. Her hair was a long, wet rope down her back. The volume of eight men and their weapons was considerable, but after the mass grave looked even with the rest of the field, Jane still kept bringing dirt until it was a bit higher. She had saved the layer of turf and weeds she had used to hide the pit, so she replanted them now in the topsoil. When she was finished, she took the tarp and spade to the house.

  She turned on the hose at the side of the house, hosed off the grass, then went to the front porch and washed off all the blood she could from the high-gloss enamel paint.

  She knew the men had come in some kind of vehicle, and she didn't want to leave it where they must have parked it, halfway up the dirt road. She went inside, searched the men's belongings, found three sets of car keys, took them all, walked up the road, and found the van. She tried a set of keys, got in, and drove the van to the house, then around the side to the back, where it would be hard to see from any angle.

  Her night of killing was nearly used up. She began to pile things in the big brick barbecue behind the house-the tarp, the blanket, the leather wallets and other perishable items the men had in their pockets. She kept the money, identification, credit cards, and loose slips of paper. In the kitchen she found a glass jar and a rubber tube that attached to the faucet for spraying dishes. She went to the van, siphoned off a quart of gasoline from its tank, and soaked the things in the barbecue. She rinsed the jar and tube with the hose.

  The last thing she did was stand on the grass in the moonlight and strip off her clothes. When she was naked except for her hiking boots, she took a windproof lighter that had belonged to one of the men, lit it, and tossed it onto the pile.

  The air gave a "huff" sound and the fire came into being above the pile of human things like a little explosion that puffed against her hair. It was a big flame, at least ten feet tall at first, bright orange with an aura of blue around it. Jane watched it for a minute, until it had begun to calm down and settle into devouring what it had been given. Then she walked out of the firelight and went about two hundred feet to the edge of the lake.

  She kept walking, and her boots sank into mud at first, making a sucking sound as she lifted them for the next step. The water was icy, but to her it felt clean and fierce and scouring. She kept going until the water reached her chest, and then bent her legs and ducked under. She came up gasping, feeling as though her skin were burning instead of cold. She took two more deep breaths and then went under again, scrubbing herself all over with her hands. She took off her boots and cleaned them of the lingering bits of mud, then walked up through the reeds to the shore. She put her boots back on and walked up toward the fire.

  She was shivering when she got there, but she stood in the heat for a few minutes, feeling the fire evaporating the moisture almost instantly. Already there seemed to be nothing recognizable in the fire, only ashes and black residue. She walked to the house, and left her boots on the back porch to dry. She locked every door, barred every window, and went upstairs. She stepped into the shower and washed herself carefully and thoroughly, beginning with her hair and ending with her feet, then dressed in a clean sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers.

  She reloaded her pistol and her shotgun. Then she went to a room that had not been touched, lay on the bed, and went to sleep.

  Over the next few days she would search the van, remove its license plates and VIN tag, and abandon it deep in the woods. She would perform many hours of scrubbing in the house, fill holes in walls, and paint over them. She would do some more planting over the grave. But most of the time, she would rest and recover.

  It was not until the fourth day, while she was indoors during a heavy rain organizing the information she had gleaned from the men's belongings and the contents of the van, that she admitted to herself what she was going to do next.

  18.

  Jane drove west on the Southern Tier Expressway over a hundred miles before she stopped at Oil Springs. This was a tiny bit of land that had been left as a Seneca reservation to preserve Seneca ownership of the spring. The water flowed into a pond and was clear and cold, but had a coating on top that was oil. In the old times, the Senecas used to collect it by dragging a blanket along the calm surface and then wring it out into containers. She had heard that the prophet Handsome Lake, who had lived not far from here in the 1790s, used to come to make medicine.

  The spring was at the end of Cuba Lake on County Route 50. She parked her car, put some equipment in a bag, and began to walk west from the pond. It didn't take her long to get far enough inland on the swampy ground to begin spotting the flower she was looking for here and there. She looked for healthy plants over seven feet tall with complicated branchings that each ended in the flat white groups of tiny flowers that looked like circles of lace.

  Harvesting was dangerous. She had retained a few pairs of surgical gloves from the housecleaning, and she put on a pair now. She used the long, razor-sharp blade of the K-Bar knife to dig up the muck around the bottoms of the plants so the roots would come up easily. She collected the roots of about fifty of the tall water plants.

  She loaded the roots into one-gallon ziplock bags, then went to a spot in the shade where there were a few large flat limestone slabs. She set the bags on the flat stone surface and used the blunt side of her hatchet to pound the roots into a mash. She repeated the process with each of the bags. Finally, she stretched the leg of a pair of panty hose over a glass jar, put a pinhole in the first of the plastic bags, and squeezed the pale yellow juice from the pulverized roots out the hole and through the homemade filter into the jar.

  Jane was always extremely cautious with water hemlock. Just handling the stems with bare hands could make a person lose consciousness, but the strongest poison was concentrated in the roots. It was a powerful nerve toxin, and eating a couple of bites of a single root would kill a person in minutes. She kept working with her bags of root mash, moving the panty hose occasionally to present a fresh filter. She filled four quart jars with the filtered root juice before she ran out. The juice she obtained was strong and clear, free of root particles. She capped the jars, reloaded her equipment into her backpack, walked to her car, and put everything in her
trunk.

  She drove on, bought a ten-foot coil of copper tubing and a camp stove in a hardware store in the next town, then stopped in the cooking section of a small department store and bought a teapot and a cooking thermometer. She drove another thirty miles and followed signs to a picnic area by a campsite. Cicutoxin, the poison in water hemlock, was a complex alcohol. Alcohol boiled at a lower temperature than water, so purifying and concentrating the juice was done by distilling it. She set the covered pot on the stove, attached the copper tubing to the spout, sealed the openings with duct tape, and let the tubing extend in a downward spiral into an empty jar. When the juice in the teapot boiled, the cicutoxin would vaporize at around seventy degrees Celsius, then condense in the long copper tube, and drip into the jar. The water wouldn't boil off until it reached one hundred degrees Celsius. She boiled the juice until about a quarter of the liquid remained, then refilled the pot and repeated the process. When she had finished, she had about a quart of highly concentrated poison. The clear liquid had lost almost all of its yellowish tinge.

  She sealed everything she had contaminated in a big plastic bag, put that into a second plastic bag, stopped after dark at a Dumpster behind a large store, and put the bag in the Dumpster, a few feet down where no human being might touch it. The Dumpster would be lifted by the mechanical arms of the garbage truck and dumped in a landfill. All she had kept was one quart jar of concentrated poison. She wasn't sure that it was as strong as the best batch she had ever made, but she was sure it wouldn't take more than a tablespoon of it to kill a person.

  In Erie, Pennsylvania, she turned in the rental car and went to a car lot and bought a used Camry for a down payment of five hundred dollars and a promise that Heather Gollensz would begin paying two hundred dollars a month after a three-month grace period. She drove on into Ohio. As she traveled, she fell back into the old discipline. She never let her gas tank go below half full, and the nearer she could keep it to full, the better. She traveled at night by preference, moving along the highway at a steady, unchanging speed with feigned patience.

  She was so familiar with the east-west interstate highways that she noticed if a new sign for a restaurant or a hotel appeared where it hadn't been last trip. She had driven these night roads with exhausted, sleeping fugitives, staring at the mirrors every few seconds because any set of headlights that lingered in her wake too long might be death waiting for its best chance. She'd driven the same routes alone, pushing the road time and the speed, because an extra day of travel could mean a helpless victim would disappear forever. This time her eyes were usually fixed on the road ahead, and her mind was occupied with trying to move forward to the day when she would find Daniel Martel.

  As Jane drove, she thought about Martel. He would be getting a bit anxious by now. He had sent out eight hired shooters to the place where he'd known Jane, and probably Shelby, would be, and the eight had simply vanished into silence. There were no news reports, no police investigations, no complaints of a disturbance. Jane was satisfied with that. She hoped the disappearance of his men kept Martel awake at night, and made him compulsively turn to look over his shoulder in daylight.

  Driving back to Los Angeles meant putting herself in the one place where her breakout of Jim Shelby wasn't a distant event rapidly fading into memory. She was going to a city where any police officer might be actively watching for her. It was also Daniel Martel's country, not hers. The Adirondack Mountains where she had ambushed Martel's men were part of her ancestral world. She had been there many times since she was a child, and it was a place where she felt comfortable. Southern California was not part of that world. It was a hot, inhospitable place for her at this time of year, when the sky would turn clear like a gigantic, unchanging blue bowl, and the temperature might rise to 110. Los Angeles was a single suburb eighty miles north to south, and a hundred east to west, and Martel probably knew it better than she ever could.

  Hunting him would mean stalking him from a distance. She stopped at a hotel in Phoenix. She began by going out to buy a computer in an Apple store and then going back to her room to begin her search. She began with Google and moved quickly to the tools she had developed to help place her runners. She signed out and then signed back in as a corporation she had invented about ten years earlier to provide work histories for her clients. She performed searches on Lexis and Nexis. In Lexis she found deeds and mortgages, motor vehicle registrations, and personal legal histories. He had never been convicted of a crime, never even been arrested. But he did have property.

  He had a house in Los Angeles. That struck her as revealing. When he had lived with Susan Shelby in Los Angeles, it wasn't at his house. He had made her rent an apartment and moved in with her. He must have been expecting to do something that would get him into trouble. He had probably never told her his real name.

  He also had a condominium in Las Vegas, which was his official residence. That made sense to her. He had some kind of business as a cover for selling prescription drugs diverted from legal distribution channels, and he seemed to have quite a bit of money. Nevada had no state income tax. There was a Porsche Carrera registered in Nevada, and a Mercedes 735 registered in California.

  She found the mortgage he had taken out to buy the house in Los Angeles, and she almost cried out in frustration. He'd had to give his Social Security number, but it had been blacked out. That number would have given her access to his credit reports and his financial records and eventually would have told her where he was.

  She still didn't have him. She had used the computer to get specific bits about him, like stakes to drive in a circle around him, the beginning of a definition. But she had not found a picture of him, had no certainty about where he was. Each time he could have made a mistake and been caught, he had avoided it and escaped. He had been supernaturally careful and thorough about removing all traces of himself from the apartment in Los Angeles he had shared with Jim Shelby's wife. In the apartment the police had found no fingerprints, no DNA traces. He had been nowhere near the building where Jane had been held and tortured, and nowhere near the house where his men had held Sarah Shelby. The underlings Jane might have used to connect him with crimes were dead.

  Jane spent some time organizing and studying the information she had found about him, then teased it to make it more useful. She used aerial maps and surface photographs to get pictures of his house and his condo and the streets on all sides of them. She got more aerial photos for each hour of the day or night, and signed into traffic cameras that were permanently trained on the major thoroughfares nearby.

  She used the driver's license numbers to bring up replicas of his actual licenses so she could see his photographs. He had thick, dark hair; a smooth, unlined face; and large, light blue eyes. She wasn't surprised that he was handsome. He had gone to Austin with confidence that he would have no trouble meeting and manipulating a woman he only expected must exist-a pharmaceutical saleswoman who worked at the nearby company headquarters. According to the licenses, he was tall-six feet two inches-and he weighed 180 pounds. She could see from the photos that he was trim, with big shoulders and chest. It was a body acquired not by playing some game, but by consciously shaping with weights and repetitive exercises. His skin was evenly tanned. It had been done not by being outdoors in some active way, but more likely by using a tanning bed. He controlled his appearance like an actor.

  She studied the pictures of his face until she was sure she could recognize it even if he added something to change his appearance-a beard, glasses, mustache, hair dye. Then she packed her clothes, computer, and guns into the car, and drove toward Los Angeles. All of the men he had sent after her had been carrying California driver's licenses.

  Jane was heading for a city where she had committed the crime of the year. Before she left Phoenix, she stopped in a wig shop and bought three wigs. One was light brown with natural-looking highlights, one was darker brown with a hint of red, and one was short and blond. She knew from experience that she could
get away with even light blond hair with her blue eyes, but the wig made her look very different. In another shop she bought two pairs of sunglasses, one that wrapped around her face, and one with big saucer-shaped dark lenses that made her face look small.

  As she drove the last hundred miles to Los Angeles on Route 10, she thought about the ways of getting to Daniel Martel. When she reached Santa Monica she took her Camry to a Toyota dealer and told the service manager to do all of the checks, replacements, and maintenance it would take to make the car into one he would buy his daughter. When she picked it up a day later, she filled the tank and had the car washed and waxed. She knew that a dirty car caught people's attention in Los Angeles, and made it look as though the driver had just blown in from elsewhere.

  She drove to the neighborhood in west Los Angeles where Daniel Martel's house was. She spent over an hour driving around the area before she swung past his address for the first time. His house was a two-story Spanish-style building with a red tile roof and a balcony with an ornate wrought-iron railing. She could see signs on the lawn for a security company, and a few decals on the lower windows and front door.

  Jane returned to her hotel and laid out a set of dark clothes, a baseball cap, more of the surgical gloves she had used for cleaning, about fifty feet of the rope she had brought to the house in the Adirondacks, her folding knife, and her two identical Beretta M92 pistols.

  At two a.m. Jane drove past Daniel Martel's house, parked a block away, and walked back to the house. She stepped around the outside, peering in windows. There was an alarm keypad that she could see beside the front door, but she could also see that the display said, "RDY": ready. It was not turned on. Did that mean he was at home, that he was in there waiting for her There were no lights on, and there was no car in the garage. She wondered if it meant that he had no fear of a break-in, or that he had known she would be coming but didn't want the security system to summon anyone. She decided it probably meant he wanted her to find her way in.