Dance for the Dead (24 page)

“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 doing 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.

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.”