by Thomas Perry
"Is any of this legal?"
"What I'm doing is so contrary to legal procedure that it has no name."
She sat erect in the chair and met his gaze steadily while she decided. "He was a ward of his grandmother because his parents were killed in a car crash. She was old at the time - about eighty. Whoever she hired to watch him didn't. Along came Raymond and Emily Decker, and he disappeared. I have no way of knowing what was going on in their minds at the time. They may have been kidnappers who stalked him from birth, or they may have been one of those half-crazy couples who create their own little world that doesn't need to incorporate all of the facts in front of their eyes. If you read the old newspaper reports, it sounds as though maybe they just found him wandering around alone in a remote area of a county park, picked him up, and then convinced themselves that he was better off with them than with anybody who let a two-year-old get that lost. I've tried to find out, and so did Mona and Dennis, but what we learned was full of contradictions."
"What sorts of contradictions?"
"Timmy says they sent pictures of him to his grandmother, sometimes holding a newspaper, sometimes with his fingerprints. He doesn't know what the letters said. If the Deckers knew where to send the letters, then they knew who he was. But I can't tell whether it was a straight ransom demand or they were trying to keep him officially alive so he could claim his inheritance when he grew up, or whether they were just being kind to an old lady by letting her know her grandson was okay."
"What do you know about the grandmother?"
"From what Dennis Morgan said, the police stopped looking. That means they never saw the letters. Grandma kept looking, so maybe she got them. She must have believed he would turn up eventually, because she tied up all the family money in a living trust for him and made a business-management firm named Hoffen-Bayne the trustee. She died a few years ago."
"Before or after Raymond and Emily Decker?"
"Before. But I'm not the best source for dates and addresses. I'm sure if you don't have it in the papers on your desk yet, it'll be in the next batch. Anyway, I don't think she hired somebody to kill them for kidnapping her grandson."
"You're the only source of information I have right now. Who did kill them?"
"I don't know."
"Who do you think did it?"
"When someone killed the Deckers, they also stole all of Timmy's belongings, every picture of him, and a lot of paper. If you're looking for somebody, you would want the photographs. But they took his toys, clothes, everything. That's a lot of work. The only reason I can think of for doing that is to hide the fact that he was alive - that a little boy lived there. Maybe they did such a good job of wiping off their own prints that they got all of his too, as a matter of course. I doubt it."
"Who would want to accomplish that?"
She hesitated, and he could tell she was preparing to be disbelieved. "What I'm telling you is not from personal knowledge. It's what Dennis Morgan told me. This company, Hoffen-Bayne, got to administer a fortune of something like a hundred million dollars. They would get a commission of at least two percent a year, or two million, for that. They also got to invest the money any way they pleased, and that gave them power. There are some fair-sized companies you can control for that kind of investment. As long as Timmy was lost, the trust would continue. You're a judge. You tell me what would happen if Timmy turned up in California."
"The court would - will - appoint a guardian, and probably in this case, a conservator, if you're right about the size of the inheritance."
"That wouldn't be Hoffen-Bayne?"
"We don't appoint business-management companies to raise children, or to audit themselves."
"Then the power and money would be in jeopardy."
"Certainly they would have to at least share the control."
"And they did try to have him declared dead."
"That's a legal convenience. It relieves them of responsibility to search for him, and also protects them if someone were to ask later why they're administering a trust for a client who hasn't been seen for seven years."
"Then it would have been even more convenient if he were really dead. They wouldn't have had to go to court at all."
"Filing a motion is a little different from hiring assassins to hunt down a six-year-old and kill him."
"Maybe. I think filing the motion was a trap. I think Dennis Morgan was poking around, and somebody noticed it. It's not all that hard to find out what you want about people: the trick is to keep them from knowing you're doing it. Dennis was a respected lawyer, but investigating wasn't his field; lawyers hire people to do that. I think they sensed that if a Washington attorney was interested, then Timmy was going to turn up sometime soon."
"And you - all of you - got caught in the trap?"
"Yes." She stood up. "You asked me what I think, so you would know where to begin. I've told you. Dennis couldn't find anybody but Hoffen-Bayne who would benefit from Timmy's death - no competing claims to the money or angry relatives, for instance. Nobody tried to break the will during all the years while Timmy was missing. But I don't know what Dennis got right and what he got wrong, and I can't prove any of it. I only saw the police putting handcuffs on four of the men in the courthouse, and there won't be anything on paper that connects them with Hoffen-Bayne or anybody else. I know I never saw them before, so I can't have been the one they recognized. They saw Timmy." She took a step toward the door. "Keep him safe."
The judge said, "Then there's you." He watched her stop and face him. "Who are you?"
"Jane Whitefield."
"I mean what's your interest in this?"
"Dennis Morgan asked me to keep Timmy alive. I did that. We all did that."
"What are you? A private detective, a bodyguard?"
"I'm a guide."
"What kind of guide?"
"I show people how to go from places where someone is trying to kill them to other places where nobody is."
"What sort of pay do you get for this?"
"Sometimes they give me presents. I declare the presents on my income taxes. There's a line for that."
"Did somebody give you a present for this job?"
"If you fail, there's nobody around to be grateful. My clients are dead." After a second she added, "I don't take money from kids, even rich kids."
"Have you served in your capacity as 'guide' for Dennis Morgan before?"
"Never met him until he called. He was a friend of a friend."
"You - all three of you - went into this knowing that whoever was near this little boy might be murdered."
She looked at him as though she were trying to decide whether he was intelligent or not. Finally, she said, "An innocent little boy is going to die. You're either somebody who will help him or somebody who won't. For the rest of your life you'll be somebody who did help him or somebody who didn't."
The judge stared down at his desk for a few seconds, his face obscured by the deep shadows. When he looked up, his jaw was tight. "You are a criminal. The system hates people like you. It has special teeth designed to grind you up."
As she watched him, she could see his face begin to set like a death mask. He pressed his intercom button. "Tell the officers to come in." He began to write, filling in lines on a form on his desk.
The two police officers swung the door open quickly and walked inside. The man had his right hand resting comfortably on the handle of the club in his belt.
The judge said, "I've finally straightened this out. Her real name is Mahoney. Colleen Anne Mahoney. She was attacked by those suspects on the way into the courthouse. Apparently it was a case of mistaken identity, because she had no connection with the Phillips case. I'm giving you a release order now, and I want all records - prints, photographs, and so on - sealed... no, destroyed. Call me when it's been done." He handed the female officer the paper. "I want to avoid any possibility of reprisals."
"Will do, Judge," said the policewoman. Kramer's instinct about her
was confirmed. She had a cute little smile.
The policeman opened the door for Jane Whitefield, but this time nobody touched her. She didn't move. "You should have those teeth checked."
He shrugged. "The system was never meant to rule on every human action. Some things slip through."
She stared at him for a second, then said simply and without irony, "Thank you, Your Honor," turned, and walked out of his office.
2
Jane Whitefield drove her rental car down Fairfax past the high school, the old delicatessens and small grocery stores and the shops that sold single items like luggage or lamps, beyond the big white CBS buildings and then into the hot asphalt parking lot at Farmers' Market, where she found refuge from the Southern California sun in the cool shadow between two tour buses. The market was crowded on Saturdays, and it took her a few minutes of threading her way among the hundreds of preoccupied people to find the pet store. There were two glass enclosures out front where puppies lay sleeping with their smooth little potbellies in the air.
She bought two cubical birdcages that had one side that could be opened for cleaning, and a two-pound bag of bird feed that was peppered with sunflower seeds. She walked across the market to a craft store where people bought kits for making bead jewelry. She drove out of the market and headed northward toward the hills, but then stopped only a few blocks up when she saw a secondhand store that looked as though it might have the right kind of teddy bear. Then she drove the winding road over Laurel Canyon to the San Fernando Valley, and on across the flats to the campus of the California State University at Northridge. She had been past the school once years ago, and carried a picture of it in her mind. It was the right kind of habitat.
Jane had not done this in years, but she was very good at it. She drove around the nearly empty campus until she found a long drive with a row of tall eucalyptus trees beside it and a few acres of model orchard beyond them. She parked her car in the small faculty parking lot behind some kind of science building and carried her cages to the eucalyptus trees. Nearly everyone on campus seemed to be in a library or dormitory, so she had the luxury of silence while she worked.
She propped open the sides of the cages with sticks that had fallen from the trees, took the food cups from their slots on the bars and filled them with bird feed, then ran thin jewelry wire from the cups to the sticks. She balanced a stone on the open wall of each cage so it would come down fast and stay shut. She sprinkled a handful of bird feed over the carpet of fallen eucalyptus leaves in front of the cages, and went for a walk. She used her sense of the geography of university campuses to find the Student Union, and sat at a table in the shade of a big umbrella at the edge of a terrace to drink a cup of lemonade.
Even at this time of year, Southern California seemed to her to be parched and inhospitable. The broad lawns in public places like this were still a little yellow and sparse from the eight-month-long summer, with its hundred-degree stretches. Back home people would be telling each other stories about years they remembered when the snow didn't stop until May, and wondering if this would be another one. When her lemonade was finished she walked back across the campus to the row of eucalyptus trees. Before she turned the corner of the science building she heard a squawk, and then some fluttering, and she thought about the difference between birds and human beings. No matter how many times it had been done, each new generation of birds flew into the trap as though it had never before happened on earth. Maybe they weren't so different.
She approached the traps, but they didn't look the way she had expected. One of them was just as she had left it, and the other one had two big blue scrub jays in it together. When she moved closer she could see that one was a male and the other female, slightly smaller with more brown on top and less blue. As she stepped to the cage, the questions began. "Jree?" asked the male. "Jree?" The female scolded, "Check check check!"
They weren't like the birds at home, but they were quick and greedy for survival, so territorial and aggressive that they had probably crowded in together without hesitation. It was too late in the year for them to be feeding hatchlings, and having one of each seemed right. They were already mated.
She poured in some more seed to give them something to think about, lifted the cage, put it in the back seat of the car, and covered it with a silk blouse from her suitcase.
Jane drove to the county office building and wiped her face clean of the thick makeup she had been using to hide the bruises, then walked to the Department of Children's Services. The people in the office were busy in a way that showed they had given up hope of ever doing all they were supposed to do but were keeping on in the belief that if they worked hard enough they would accomplish some part of it. There were two empty desks for each one that had a person behind it, so they moved from one to another picking up telephones and slipping files in and out of the piles like workers tending machines in a factory. She waited for a minute, then saw a woman hang up her telephone and pause to make a note in a file.
Jane stepped forward. "Excuse me," she said. "I need to leave something for Nina Coffey."
The woman's eyes rolled up over the rim of her glasses and settled on Jane; her head, which was still bent over the papers on the desk, never moved. Jane could tell that her bruises had identified her as an abused mother. "How can I help you?"
"It's this teddy bear," said Jane. "Timmy Phillips left it in my car."
The woman showed no recognition of the name. She snatched a gummed sticker out of the top drawer and put her pen to it. "Spell it," she said.
"P-H-I-L-L-I-P-S. I'd appreciate it if you got it to her, because it's important to Timmy." Jane handed the woman the small, worn brown teddy bear.
The woman turned her sharp gaze through the glasses at the bear. "I can see that," she said. "Don't worry. I'll give it to her."
"Thanks," said Jane warmly.
The telephone rang and the woman held up one finger to signal that Jane was to wait while she answered it, but Jane turned away. She heard the woman call, "Mrs. Phillips?" but she was out the door.
Jane waited down the street from the parking garage. She had seen the row where the employees' parking spaces were, and now she parked at the curb where she could watch them.
It was not long before she saw the woman she had been waiting for. Nina Coffey was in her forties and very slight with red hair that was fading into a gray that muted it. Jane saw that she had the habit of holding her keys in one fist when she came out of the elevator, so she suspected that this was a woman whose profession had given her a clear-eyed view of the planet she was living on. In her other hand she held a hard-sided briefcase and a teddy bear.
Jane waited for her to start her car, drive to the exit, and move off down the street before she pulled her own car out from among the others along the block. She followed Nina Coffey at a distance, and strung two other cars between them so she wouldn't get too accustomed to the sight of Jane's. Coffey turned expertly a couple of times, popped around a corner and then up onto a freeway ramp, and Jane was glad she had put the other cars between them so that she had time to follow in the unfamiliar city.
She pushed into the traffic and over to the same lane that Coffey chose and stayed there, letting a couple of other cars slip in between them again. Coffey turned off the freeway in a hilly area that the signs said was in Pasadena, and Jane had to move closer. There seemed to be stoplights at every intersection, and Nina Coffey was an aggressive driver who had a knack for timing them. After the third one, Jane had to stop while Coffey diminished into the distance. She turned right, then left, then sped up five blocks of residential streets that had no lights, turned left, then right again to come out three blocks behind her.
Finally Nina Coffey came to a street where she had to wait to make a left turn, and Jane caught up with her again. When Coffey stopped in front of a modest two-story house with a brick facade, Jane kept going. As she passed, she studied the car that blocked the driveway and knew it was the right house.
The car was a full-sized Chevrolet painted a blue as monotonous as a police uniform.
The authorities had done exactly as Jane had hoped they would. They were protecting Timmy from everybody, without distinction - the people who wanted him declared dead, the reporters, people who were sure to search the family tree to suddenly discover they were relatives - and without comment. They had put Timmy in the home of a cop while the mess around him was sorted out.
She spent fifteen minutes driving around the neighborhood to look for signs that anyone else had found the house. She saw no parked cars with heads in them, no nearby houses with too many blinds drawn, and no male pedestrians between twenty and fifty. She came back out on Colorado Boulevard satisfied and drove up two streets before she found the place where she wanted to park her car She had to climb over the fence at the back of the yard and crouch in the little cinderblock enclosure where the pool motor droned away and stare in the back window until she saw Timmy. She watched him eat his dinner in the kitchen with two other children, and then begin to climb the carpeted stairway to the second floor. Upstairs, a light went on for a few minutes and then went out. The other children weren't much older than Timmy was but they were still downstairs. She supposed he was still living on Chicago time, where it was two hours later.
The sun was low when Jane decided how she would do it. She walked quietly to the back of the house. In a moment she was up the fig tree and on the roof of the garage. She walked across it to a second-floor window of the house, tied a length of the jewelry wire into a loop, inserted it between the window and the sill, and slowly twirled it until she had it around the latch. She gave a sharp tug to open the latch, quietly slid the window up, and slipped into the upstairs hallway.
When she opened the bedroom door Timmy was lying on his side looking at her, his coffee-with-cream eyes reflecting a glint of the light coming from the hallway, his child-blond hair already in unruly tufts from burrowing into the pillow. Somebody had bought him a new pair of pajamas with pictures of fighter planes in a dogfight all over them, and had at least looked at him closely enough to be sure they fit his long legs. He held the teddy bear on the sheet beside him. "Jane?" he said.