Shadow Woman (20 page)

Earl and Linda sat in a cowboy
bar in Golden, a half hour into the mountains west of Denver, and
watched the eleven o’clock news on the television set on the
wall above them. The news-woman was reporting “the senseless,
execution-style killing of a young police officer.”

Earl knitted his eyebrows. “Now,
that’s typical, isn’t it? They haven’t found out
why it happened, so they say it was senseless. They read the words on
the prompter, but they don’t seem to know what they’re
saying.”

Linda could see the newswoman
standing about twenty yards away from the Lexus, and behind her the
police crew was dusting it for prints. The car trunk was open. “The
police are urging anyone who has information about the incident to
contact them. They have no solid leads as to why anyone would have
shot the officer. One theory I’ve heard is that even though the
new Lexus sedan had not yet been reported missing, the officer might
have seen something suspicious and pulled it over.”

Linda held her breath, waiting
for Earl to notice what had not been said. Finally she knew that he
already had. He swallowed the last of the beer in his glass, set it
on the table, and said, “Well, we’d better go see if we
can figure out where he’s gotten to now.”

“I’m sorry, Earl,”
she said. She wanted to waste some time in the bar, where there were
people, before she blithely stepped into the dark with Earl. He was
perfectly capable of hiding his anger until they were somewhere along
a deserted road. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know
how I could have – ”

“I did it,” he said.
“I stopped you before you could do him right.” He added,
“I keep thinking, ‘So she might have put a round into the
gas tank. If we’d been back a few yards it wouldn’t have
been so bad.’” He pulled her up by the arm. “Better
than this, anyway. This is a joke.”

When they reached the
neighborhood where Hatcher had been living as David Keller, they
drove past the place where he had parked the used Saturn that
evening. For an instant Linda felt the thrill of surprise and
anticipation: the space was not empty. But when Earl drove closer she
could see that the car in the space was a Thunderbird.

Earl left their car a block from
the rear of Hatcher’s building and they climbed the back
stairs. Earl opened the lock effortlessly and they stepped inside,
put on their gloves, and began the search. As soon as Linda opened
the refrigerator, she knew what the rest of the small apartment would
be like.

After fifteen minutes, Earl sat
down on the couch. “He’s getting better at this.”

“He doesn’t have as
much stuff to worry about,” said Linda. “She made him
travel light.”

“Let’s see,”
muttered Earl. “He’s in the trunk of the car. You put
four shots in there. You would think with four rounds rattling around
in there and bouncing off things, one of them would have clipped him,
wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. I did. But it didn’t
happen. There’s no blood anyplace.”

“He knows he’s a
lucky man, but he’s scared to death. He hears us leave, he pops
out and runs like hell – probably through back yards, or the
police would have picked him up. He’s too stupid to do the
wrong thing and run across town. He comes right back here. What does
he do?”

“It looks like he spent
some time cleaning up.”

“Right. He couldn’t
have done that for us. We know who he is already. He must think the
cops are going to come here looking for him. What else did he do?”

“He took his car.”

“That’s last. What’s
first?”

“He packed his stuff.
Probably some money, the other gun he bought.”

Earl nodded. “He did that.
Put yourself in his mind. You’re scared. You’re so scared
you just ran home as fast as you could. You clean up, throw
everything in a suitcase. You’re about to go out the door and
drive until you run out of gas. Where are you going to go?”

Linda’s eyes narrowed, and
she bit her lower lip, then released it to reveal a little smile. She
looked across Earl at the telephone on the table. “Does it have
a redial button?”

Earl opened his briefcase and
found the little microcassette recorder. “Testing,” he
said. “You’d better work.” He clicked two buttons.
“Testing. You’d better work,” it said. Earl pressed
two more buttons, then looked at Linda. He lifted the receiver,
clamped the tape recorder to the earpiece with one hand, pressed the
redial button with the other, and recorded the series of quick
musical tones.

Linda counted the tones. “Eleven
numbers. Long distance. An area code and a number.”

Earl hung up before the phone on
the other end could ring. Then he played back the recording of eleven
tones and handed the recorder to Linda. “Get the numbers.”
He stood up, took a penlight, and began to shine it on the surfaces
of the furniture.

Linda lifted the receiver and
said into the recorder, “One,” then pressed the one
button and recorded the tone. She said, “Two,” pressed
the two button, and recorded the tone. When she reached six, she hung
up to avoid completing a call, then got the last four numbers on
tape.

It took Linda another ten
minutes to decipher the recorded tones of the woman’s telephone
number. “I think I have it. Should I test it?”

Earl said, “Give it a
try.”

Linda said aloud, “One.
Area code seven one six,” then dialed the rest of it. After
four rings she heard a woman’s voice. “Leave a message
when you hear a beep.” Linda hung up. “It’s the
woman. She has her answering machine on.”

Earl took his penlight and
opened David Keller’s telephone book. “Seven one six….
That’s New York… Buffalo, New York.” He closed the
book and looked at Linda. “Maybe this time we got lucky, not
him, and not her. She’s got her answering machine on. He called
her no more than an hour or two ago. Maybe it’s on because
she’s already talked to him and gone off to meet him. But it
just could be that he got her machine too, and left a message.”

Linda looked at the phone as
though she could see down the wire to the other end. “Most
machines will play back a message if you’re away. Ours will do
it if you push a two-digit code. Some use codes with three or four,
but it might be worth a try.”

“There are only a hundred
possible combinations. And we aren’t paying the phone bill.”

It was two o’clock when
Linda heard a change. “Leave a message when – ” and
the recording stopped. There was a click, and she could hear the
answering machine rewinding, then another click. Linda held Earl’s
tape recorder beside the earpiece of the telephone.

“Jane? Jane? It’s
me. I’m in trouble. Somehow they found me. A woman tried to
kill me tonight. I’ve got to get out. I’m going to head
north, to Cheyenne. No, too close. Billings. I’ll try to make
it to Billings, Montana. I’ll call again when I get there.”

She was laughing with delight
when she played the recording for Earl, but he was staring at the
wall, and he wasn’t smiling.

When it ended, he sat in silence
for a moment, then glanced at his watch. “We’d better get
going. I’ve got to put you on a plane, and then head up north.”

“Put me on a plane?”

He spoke so gently that she was
afraid of him. “He saw your face, honey. Having you around
isn’t going to do me any good in Billings.”

“You’re sending me
home?”

“Home?” His grin
came like a sudden snarl. “No. You’ve got to go do
something about her.”

“Jane? Jane? It’s
me. I’m in trouble. Somehow they found me. A woman tried to
kill me tonight. I’ve got to get out. I’m going to head
north, to Cheyenne. No, too close. Billings. I’ll try to make
it to Billings, Montana. I’ll call again when I get there.”

The shock in his voice made
Jane’s scalp prickle, and a hot, sick sweat began to
materialize on the back of her neck. The machine’s inhuman
voice said, “End of messages,” and clicked off. She
pressed the button again and heard Hatcher’s voice. “Jane?
Jane?” She listened to the rest of it, each word of it giving
her bits of information that Pete Hatcher probably didn’t know.

He had made a mistake, but even
after he had seen the executioner, he had no idea what he had done
wrong. He had stayed hidden for three months, so it had nothing to do
with the escape route. He must have done something as David Keller
that they had expected Pete Hatcher to do. He had gotten himself on
some list.

“I’m going to head
north, to Cheyenne. No, too close.” She felt something
clutching her stomach. He had been sitting in his apartment in Denver
all this time, gotten up a hundred mornings and gone to bed a hundred
evenings, and it had never occurred to him to plan the best way to
get out if they found him. It sounded as though he were running his
finger up a road map while he was talking, looking for a route that
sounded safe to his panicked brain.

She had told him to prepare
contingency plans. After something happened, he wouldn’t be
able to think clearly, he would forget details, leave things behind
that he needed. But had she told him? She tried to remember their two
conversations. She thought she had told him. She had tried to instill
in him an attitude. Other people could make decisions at the last
moment, but a fugitive could not. He had to know in advance the
places where he was willing to show his face, what he was willing to
do, what he was going to say when somebody asked him a question.

Jane slowly felt the suspicion
harden into a certainty. She had not taught Pete Hatcher how to stay
alive. The excuses began to flood her consciousness. Getting him out
of Las Vegas had not been a question of redirecting a running man. It
had been like staging a prison break. He had been watched, followed,
suspected by people who seemed to have no other duties. She had
needed to slip him out between the guards from a standing start, and
then spend most of her energy delaying the pursuit. But repeating the
circumstances to herself accomplished nothing. Words were enough to
apologize for her haste, but not enough to absolve her if Pete
Hatcher died.

Now he was on his way to
Billings, Montana, a city with a population of no more than eighty
thousand, where finding his car would probably be no harder than
driving around for an afternoon and looking for it. She knew about
the car from his telephone message too. If he had to decide in the
middle of the night between stopping in Cheyenne and going on up
Interstate 25, then he was driving a car he owned.

She looked around her at her
bedroom. It occurred to her that she had taken very little out of
here when she had gotten married. It was as though she had
subconsciously tried to leave Jane Whitefield behind, where she could
cause no trouble. There were most of her clothes, hanging in the
closet with dry cleaners’ bags over them, and there was her old
dresser.

She walked along the hall and
down the staircase, then through the kitchen to the basement steps.
She turned on the light and looked around. The house had been built
in the days when they used stones for basements, the beams under a
house were just rough-planed tree trunks, and the floorboards were
held to them with square-headed spikes. She walked to the old set of
shelves her great-grandmother had used to store her preserves –
sweet peeled peaches and pears in sugary water, stewed tomatoes,
applesauce, corn soup, and strawberries, all in big mason jars with
rubber gaskets and glass tops with a steel-clamp contraption that
held them tight. The fall canning had lasted through her
grandmother’s time. Only the old jars had survived her
mother’s.

Jane went to the oil furnace,
moved the stepladder beside it, then disconnected a section of one of
the heating ducts. This was a round one that was left over from the
days when the house had been heated by an old coal furnace. It wasn’t
connected to anything anymore, but it ran from the now-empty site of
the coal bin, turned upward, and connected to the floor under the
kitchen, where there had once been a wide brass grate. She looked
inside, found the box, and set it on the top step.

She separated James Weiss’s
papers from the others – his birth certificate, New York
driver’s license, his credit cards, his Social Security card,
his college diploma, the life insurance policy he had bought six
years ago. James Weiss was one of the most credible identities she
had ever assembled – certainly among the best of the adult
males.

James Weiss had no pedigree, but
his credentials had a long and complicated history. His birth
certificate was genuine. Years ago, a man Jane knew had gotten a job
in a county courthouse in Pennsylvania, where he had quietly added
fifty birth records. Jane had bought twenty of them. She had liked
the idea so much that she had allowed two women who worked in county
clerks’ offices in Ohio and Illinois to repeat it. The woman in
Ohio had offered to do it because she had known a little girl for
whom Ohio had turned into a dangerous place and knew that Jane had
been the one to make her disappear. The woman in Illinois had made
the new people and sent their birth certificates to Jane as a present
on the anniversary of her own disappearance from a tight spot in
California.

James Weiss had been one of the
Illinois woman’s creations.

Jane had gotten him a Social
Security card and a driver’s license by sending a young man who
owed her a favor to apply for them. The college diploma was the
product of another ruse she had invented at about the same time. She
had searched alumni magazines until she found a James Weiss who had
graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She had run
a credit check on him and gotten the information she needed to
request a transcript and a duplicate of his diploma. Anyone who
wished to could call and verify that they were genuine.