“Have you heard anything about burglaries in places they’re supposed to protect – as though they might be fooling their own alarm systems or something?”
“No. What I hear most about them now is they hunt for people.”
“What sort of people?”
“The usual. Skip-trace, open warrants, wanted for questioning, runaways. Somebody jumps bail, the bail bondsman is on the hook. Some clerk takes a little money out of the till and runs. The police don’t look very hard, so the company hires Intercontinental.”
“What’s different?”
“The ones they bring in seem to fall down a lot. Maybe a broken arm, maybe a leg. Maybe their face doesn’t look too good.”
“It’s an old company. Did they always have that reputation?”
Ellery Robinson shrugged. “I didn’t always know people who got chased. Then I was away for a few years. It’s since I got back that I’ve been hearing things.”
“Who have you been hearing them from? Can you help me get to one of them?”
The little woman leaned back on her worn couch and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. She seemed to be searching for names and addresses up there, but Jane could tell that she was rejecting some of them for reasons that she would not reveal.
The young man stood beside a car in the darkness. He was tall and heavy, with a jacket that was too thick for this weather and baggy blue pants. Jane could see that there was a streetlight directly above him, but the lamp was a jagged rim of broken glass.
Ellery Robinson followed the angle of Jane’s eyes. “The street dealers shoot them out at night, and the city replaces them in the day. Everybody gets paid.” She stopped walking and held Jane’s arm. The young man looked up the block for three or four seconds, then down the block. When he was satisfied, he came away from the car and walked across the sidewalk onto the lawn.
Ellery Robinson looked up and said to him, “This is the woman.” Then she turned to Jane. “He won’t hurt you.” Then she turned and walked away across the packed dirt of the big gray project toward her room.
Jane turned to the young man. “Thank you for coming.”
The young man started walking, and she stepped off with him. “Got to keep moving or everybody starts to notice you’re not going about your business.”
“All right.”
“She said you want to know about Intercontinental.”
“Yes,” said Jane. She waited for the logical question, but it did not come. He didn’t consider it his business why she wanted to know, just as Ellery Robinson had not taken it on herself to tell either of them the other’s name.
He said, “I worked for them.”
“How long?”
“About two weeks.” He anticipated the next question. “In October. They put out ads in this part of town. They wanted store security for two big malls in time for Christmas. You know, they didn’t want a couple of white kids in uniforms in front of a store on Crenshaw. They’d just get hurt.”
“What happened?”
“They made me a trainee. That means they don’t have to pay regular wages. They put me through a lie detector test, a couple of days in a classroom, and turned me out. I worked the malls for a week and a half.”
“Why did they fire you?”
The young man’s eyes shot to hers and then ahead again. “Security check turned up my priors. Couldn’t get bonded.”
“What did you find out before you left?”
“Now you’re not going to believe me, right?” he asked. “I got priors, and I’m a ‘disgruntled former employee.’”
Jane looked up at the sky, then sighted along the wall of the complex. “It’s a cold, clammy night for L.A. It’ll probably rain soon, from the way it feels. And you may not believe it, but I hardly ever find myself in this part of town after midnight in any weather.”
“I can believe that,” he said.
“If I thought you were going to lie to me, I’d be pretty stupid to be here, wouldn’t I?”
“Yeah.”
“Then tell me what it was like.”
“They’re looking for young men with strong motivation and they’ll give them the skills to succeed. Like the army. They got this guy who comes in and tells you how to be a thief in a big store so that you know what to look for.”
“Did he get it right?”
“There were plenty of people in that room who could tell you for sure, but I wasn’t one of them. I think it was pretty close, though, because they were all listening. Probably got some new ideas for the off-season.”
“The skills to succeed. Can you tell me anything about this guy? Who was he?”
“His name was Farrell. Sort of an old guy with gray hair that’s all bristly like a brush and spit-shined shoes. They called him the training officer. After he told us how to spot thieves, he told us what to do about them.”
“Take them to the back of the store and call your supervisor?”
“Yeah,” he said. “He says the system doesn’t do any good. They get a court date and in a day they’re back for more. So the supervisor would take them someplace and scare them.”
“How scared?”
“Farrell says that comes under initiative. The company judges supervisors on the results.”
“What are the results?”
“He says there are three kinds: the ones who don’t need it and are doing it for some kind of kick, the ones in a crew that sells it, and junkies. There’s no way to make any of them stop, but you can make them go to another store next time.”‘
“Did you get to see any of this?”
“Once. A woman got caught with a bag that had a big box in it with a trapdoor cut in it, and she was shoveling stuff into it. The supervisor took her in the back for a while, then shoved her out the loading dock door. She ran.”
“I’ve heard this before. Stores do it themselves. What else did you see?”
“The next week my background check comes in, so I’m out. I turn in my blues and go home. Two days later I get a phone call. It’s Farrell. He says he’s sorry to hear what happened, but maybe he can do something for me. I got initiative and motivation and I’m not afraid to do what needs to be done. He says sometimes there are jobs for people who cant make it through a background check. I’d still be working for Intercontinental, but they’d pay me in cash. Kind of an undercover job, and it paid a lot more.”
“Did he say what you would be doing?”
“I’m twenty-two. Never had a job before because I’m dragging a five-page rap sheet. Got two convictions. Aggravated assault – did three for that in youth camp. Assault with a deadly weapon – did three more for that in Soledad. I figure he was looking for a brain surgeon.”
“You said there were a lot of people in the training class who had the same problem. Did anybody else get the same offer?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did you tell him?”
They reached the sidewalk on the other side of the complex. He moved to the outside and looked carefully up and down the street before he ventured out of the shelter of the big buildings. “I told you I couldn’t get another job.”
“So you signed on.”
“He had me come to another office. Not the big place where they hire and train people. This one was out in Van Nuys. There were eight or ten men hanging around – white guys, black guys, a couple of Mexicans. Everybody dressed good, but not really doing much. The sign on the door said ‘Enterprise Development.’”
Jane remembered the men at the courthouse. They had all been wearing suits or sportcoats, and none of them had been carrying anything that could connect them with Intercontinental Security. “Where in Van Nuys?”
“The address is 5122 Van Nuys Boulevard. Big building, small office.”
“What did you do there?”
“Farrell came and talked to me for a while.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Pretty much what anybody tells you when you’re doi
ng something you get paid in cash for. If something goes wrong they’ll slip you bail money, but if you tell anybody anything, there are a bunch of them and only one of you.”
“And he still didn’t tell you what he wanted you for?”
“Yeah, he did,” said the young man. “Hunting.”
“What?”
“That’s what he said. The way it works is, the company has a list of people they want. The company does whatever is legal to find them. That’s all in the open. It’s a big company with offices in fifty places and a lot of people on the payroll. But then there’s some cases that are off the books. Like maybe a guy disappears at the same time as a computer chip or a famous painting or something. The company knows it, they know he’s got it, or he’s got the money from it. Somehow he got away with it.”
“So they hunt him.”
“Yeah. The rest of it was just about the head guy.”
“What about him?”
“How he did all of it. He went to work in the L.A. office a few years ago and set all this up. He was born off in the woods someplace way north of here, and he’s a tracker. He thinks like a hound. Once he’s got the scent, he never gives up. Farrell says he used to go after killers all by himself just for the kick it gave him. He gets a rush out of it, like a hunter.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When did he go after killers?”
“Before. When he was a cop.”
Jane felt increasingly tense. “What’s his name?”
“Bearclaw.”
It wasn’t exactly a surprise, but she felt a sensation like an electric shock. “Barraclough?”
“B-A-R-R-A-something. He’s – ”
“I’ve heard of him,” Jane interrupted. She tried to clear her mind of the thoughts that were crowding in. She could almost see Danny Mittgang’s face eight or nine years ago when she had asked him why he was running. He had not said the Los Angeles police wanted him as a material witness; what came out of Danny’s mouth was “Barraclough.” He had actually begun to sweat and gulp air. The name was already so familiar in certain circles that he had expected her to know it.
She had heard it many times after that, and each time there was something odd about the story. A fugitive’s friends who had refused to betray him the first time they were questioned talked to Barraclough. A middle-aged man who had committed a white-collar crime would uncharacteristically forget there was no evidence against him and burst out at Barraclough with guns blazing. Barraclough would use information that could have come only from a wiretap to find a suspect, but no wiretap evidence would be introduced at the trial. She had filed the name with a few others, policemen in various parts of the country who were willing to do just about anything to catch a suspect. But the difference between Barraclough and the others was that when his name was mentioned, the person who said it was always afraid.
Jane tried to concentrate. She was not likely to get a second interview with this young man. “How did you get out of the job?”
“No problem. I told Farrell I didn’t want in.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t like him.”
“It was the job you didn’t like, wasn’t it? The first one he wanted you to do?”
The young man shrugged. “Ellery said you might be interested in the picture they gave me, and I just told you I got no job.”
Jane held out her hand. In the palm were two fresh green bills that had been rolled into her fingers since she’d come out of the shadows to meet him. They unrolled enough so that he could see the hundreds in the corners.
He reached inside his jacket and pulled a photograph out of his breast pocket. He handed it to her and then gently plucked the two bills off her palm.
Jane held the picture up, trying to catch the dim glow of the distant street lamp. She didn’t want to wait to know whether it was one of the Christmas snapshots the Deckers had mailed to Grandma or one of the family mementos the killers had taken from the Washington house. She caught a flash of blond hair, and held it higher to be sure. It wasn’t a picture of Timmy at all: it was Mary Perkins.
17
Mary Perkins had spent most of her month in Ann Arbor learning about Donna Kester. She had discovered that Donna was not comfortable in the apartment that Jane Whitefield had helped her to rent. It was not Jane Whitefield’s fault, although she was tempted to sweep up whatever annoying particles of blame were lying around and heap them on her. Mary had assumed that Donna Kester was going to be someone who would like the long, clean lines of the modern apartment complex. It reminded Mary of the hotels where she had stayed for most of her adult life.
But as the winter came on, the building seemed hastily built and drafty, as though the carpenters had left something undone that she couldn’t see. The exercise room that the tenants shared was a big box with a glass wall where women a lot younger than Mary went to display the results of many earlier visits to young men who seemed to be too intent on lifting large pieces of iron to notice what was being offered. The pool in the courtyard promised more of the same in the distant summer without the chance to hide the mileage under a good pair of tights. And the dirty snow that had drifted over its plastic cover began to contribute to her feeling that summer wasn’t something that was still to come.
As Donna Kester explained her position to herself, the place wasn’t congenial. She moved closer to the university and rented the top floor of a big house that had been built in the 1920s. It was the sort of house where she had grown up in Memphis, with a lot of time-darkened wood in places where they didn’t put wood anymore, and a layer of thick carpet that covered the stairway and muffled the creak and was much cleaner at the edges than at the center.
Her apartment had a small, neat little kitchen and a bedroom with a brass bed in it that wasn’t a reproduction of anything, but wasn’t good enough to be an antique. The closet was small, but it was big enough for the sort of wardrobe that Donna Kester was likely to acquire. The living room had a bad couch and a good easy chair that was aimed as though by a surveyor directly at a twenty-year-old RCA television set that picked up only two channels she had trouble telling apart. But the two channels had forecasters who did a fair job of predicting the weather, and this was about all she required of them for the moment because it let her know what to wear while she was out looking for a job.
Mary began to feel more comfortable as Donna Kester soon after she moved into the old apartment. She had no trouble suppressing the landlords’ curiosity with a vague reference to a divorce. In the future, whenever they had a question in their minds about her lack of a work history and shallow credit record, she could be too sensitive to talk about it. They could chew on the divorce and come up with plausible answers until they found one that satisfied them. It sometimes seemed that Donna Kester knew everything about people that Mary Perkins knew, only it hadn’t cost her as much.
Donna walked into the hallway, threaded her new scarf into the sleeve of her big goose-down coat, stuffed her new gloves into the pockets, and hoisted the coat onto the peg. She sat down on the steps to take off her boots, and felt the distressing sensation of having the melted snow from her last trip soak through the seat of her pants. She stood up quickly, set the boots on the mat, and carefully made her way up the stairs in her socks. She felt unfairly punished. She thought she had learned about tracking snow on the steps early enough. The carpet would have dried by now if there had been heating ducts near the entrance at the foot of the stairs.
If she owned this place, she would damned well have a contractor in by tomorrow noon. She would put a big old brass register right by the door where a person could get hugged by that breath of hot air as soon as she made it inside, and then leave her coat and boots in front of it to get toasted before she went out again. She had a brief fantasy about buying the house from the Monahans and getting the contractor on the phone before the ink on the deed was dry.
She reached into her purse and grasped her key.
That made her feel better. It was the big old-fashioned kind that was a shaft of steel four inches long with an oval ring on one end and the teeth on the other. It looked like the key to a castle and it made her feel safe. She had some justification for the feeling. The lock set into the thick, solid door looked about the size of a deck of cards, with big steel tumblers and springs that snapped like a trap when she locked it, and it was easy to see that it had been in there for a long time. If there had ever been a break-in they would have replaced it.
She reached the top, put her hand on the yellowed porcelain doorknob, pushed in her key, and felt the door swing open. The lights were on. She turned and tried to step back down the stairs as quickly and quietly as she could, but she knew she was making too much noise – already had made too much noise just coming in and climbing the stairs – so she began to take the steps by leaning on the railing and jumping as many as she could to land with a thump.
She burned with a hatred for her stupidity. When she had felt the cold wet spot on the stairs she should have known someone else had been here. It wasn’t as though it were a faint clue; it was a warning sign practically branded on her ass. She regretted all of it: leaving the sprawling, noisy, busy apartment complex for this old house where they didn’t even have to think hard about how to get her alone because she was always alone; letting herself rent a second apartment at all, because showing the false documents twice raised the risk by exactly one hundred percent; trusting like a child to big locks and keys – no, hiding the way a child did, not by concealing herself but by covering her own eyes with her hands.
As she reached the bottom and realized with a pang that common sense required that she race through the door into the snow without stopping for her boots, the voice touched her gently.
“It’s me,” said Jane Whitefield. “Don’t run. It’s only me.”
Mary stopped with her face to the door. She turned and looked up. She could see the silhouette of the tall, slim woman in front of the dimly lighted doorway at the top of the stairs. The shape was dark, a deeper shadow, and for a second a little of the fear came back into her chest like a paralysis in her lungs. Then the woman at the top of the stairs swung Mary’s door open and said in the same quiet voice, “Sorry to startle you.”
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