Shadow Woman (55 page)

“What do you mean, you
couldn’t deliver them?”

“There’s nothing
there. The lady’s house burned down. You want to find where
she’s living now, we’ll be happy to deliver them there.”
He paused. “Lady?”

Linda stared at the wall of her
apartment, but no words came to her, because her mind was moving too
quickly. “No thanks,” she said at last. “Just
cancel the order.”

She tested each of the
possibilities. Had it been a simple accident – a short-circuit
or something? But why would it happen now? The odds against that were
astronomical, with nobody in the house to leave anything turned on.
Maybe Earl had failed again, and decided it was time to burn the
house with two bodies in it that matched his description and hers.
No. That had not been a plan, it had just been talk. Earl never
panicked. More likely, he should have done it but hadn’t, and
this was Seaver sending them a message.

What would Earl want her to do
now? The answer came to her slowly, in simple, incontestable
statements. Earl never gave up. If the house had simply burned by
itself, she and Earl would need the money for killing Pete Hatcher
more than ever. If Seaver had burned the house, then Earl would want
to kill Pete Hatcher so he could add the cost of rebuilding to the
fee and make Seaver pay for it. No matter what had happened in
California, when Earl came for her, he would want to see some
evidence that Linda had been doing what he had told her to do in New
York.

She stood up and began to pack
her belongings. When she had finished, she locked her suitcase in the
trunk of her car and came back to put the items she would need into
her purse. She walked to the door and looked back before she turned
off the light. The only thing left in the room that she had brought
with her was the telephone answering machine. With the house gone, it
could be Earl’s last way to reach her.

Jane
was already standing when the hatch of the plane opened. She
lockstepped up the aisle with the others, then broke free and hurried
along the accordion tunnel and into Kennedy Airport. She rushed along
the concourse, took the escalator two steps at a time, stepped to the
ticket counter, and found that there was not a flight to Buffalo
until 3:30. She bought the ticket, then walked to the bank of
telephones along the opposite wall.

Jane called the toll-free
reservation number of every airline that flew from Kennedy, then
worked her way through the ones that left from La Guardia and Newark.
Only two airlines had flights that were scheduled to take off earlier
than hers, and both were already full. Jane was not surprised.
Buffalo was not the sort of place people visited on impulse, so the
flights tended to be booked in advance. She would have to wait three
hours – no, only two hours, now.

She used the rest of her time to
work the airport shops. She found some leather bomber jackets and
selected one a size too big for her. It had big map pockets that
started at the belly and ran up her ribs. The jacket would pass as
cute if a woman wore it, but the look was decidedly male. The big
shoulders and the roomy fit would disguise her shape; the thick,
stiff leather would provide a distinct advantage against a knife.
Anything metallic she put in the map pockets would serve as body
armor. She found a smaller shop that sold monogrammed clothes, picked
out a black wool baseball cap, and declined to have it monogrammed.
She found a pair of soft black leather gloves. It was often a woman’s
hands that gave her away at a distance. She decided the blue jeans
she was wearing were sufficiently nondescript, as were the boots she
had worn in the mountains.

The flight to Buffalo took less
than an hour, but to Jane it was endless. Carey was out of surgery
now, and probably in his office down the street from the hospital. If
she wanted to warn him, this was the time. She could avoid his
telephones entirely, by calling Jake Reinert. There was absolutely no
chance that the woman had tapped Jake’s telephone. She could
speak freely to Jake and ask him to go to Carey’s office and
tell him in person. The problem was that she still was not sure what
to tell Carey to do.

The woman was a professional, so
she would be watching for particular signs, and she would know what
she would do if she saw them. What would she do if Carey received a
visitor, then abruptly closed his office and left for the day? She
would follow him. The answer always seemed to come out the same.

The plane began its descent just
west of Rochester, and in ten minutes it was gliding up the runway at
Buffalo International. Jane hurried past the car rental desks and
went outside to flag a cab. The woman had been here for two weeks,
and it was likely that she had rented a car at the airport. If she
had, then she would have come out and seen the three or four fleets
of nearly identical cars lined up behind the terminal. When she saw
one of those four models in the right color, it was possible she
would know the person in it had just come from the airport, and begin
to wonder.

Jane had the taxi driver take
her to an agency close to the center of the city, where she rented a
Dodge minivan with tinted side and rear windows. If she was going to
use it to watch for the woman, then she had to be able to look
without having her head visible in the driver’s seat.

Jane drove up the street toward
Carey’s office, her gloved hands clutching the wheel, the
collar of her new jacket up, her hair tucked under her hat and a pair
of sunglasses over her eyes. She circled the block, trying to take in
all of the sights at once. There was nothing out of place. The cars
behind the building belonged to Carey’s receptionist and three
nurses. As she came up the next street, she noticed that the lights
were off in the examining rooms and in the little office where Carey
talked to patients. He was gone.

Jane glanced at her watch. It
was five forty-five, and Carey had undoubtedly gone back to the
hospital. As she drove past the big white building she admitted to
herself that it was getting dark. She would have to take off the
sunglasses before she went inside. She had hoped not to need to go
inside at all. She didn’t know most of the people who worked in
the hospital, so the woman would have a fair chance of picking Jane
out of the crowd before Jane noticed her. The few people Jane did
know were all old buddies of Carey’s. If she walked in and one
of them called, “Jane!” ugly things could start to
happen.

Jane parked her van. She was on
the same side of the street as the hospital’s front entrance,
so she wouldn’t have to hustle Carey across the open, empty
pavement, but the distance was greater than she would have liked. She
glanced at her watch again and tried to steady her nerves. This was
just like taking a runner out of the world. She had done this before.
It should be easy. The doctors always went in and out of the rear
entrance, where their reserved parking spaces were. If the woman was
watching the car, she would be in the back. Jane would find Carey,
push him into an elevator, and lead him to the front door. She would
do it about ten minutes before he usually left, get him into the van,
and whisk him off to a place where he would be safe.

Jane walked to the doors with a
group who seemed to be relatives of someone who’d had a baby.
There were a white-haired couple wearing the benevolent grandparent
expression and a young dark-haired man who carried a bouquet of roses
in a florist’s vase so that water dripped on his coat. He
seemed to be looking through objects rather than at them, while his
mind made a rare visit to the realm of philosophy.

Jane judged that they would make
a good camouflage. She opened the door for the parents before the man
could transfer the roses to his other hand. He grinned apologetically
and she grinned back at him in understanding. She said softly, “Are
you a new daddy?” and he nodded proudly. “Congratulations,”
she said. She pushed the roses up. “Carry them this way, so the
water doesn’t leak out.”

The little family group kept
Jane surrounded all the way to the elevator, while Jane scanned the
lobby for anyone who could possibly be the woman – blond hair,
five foot six to five foot eight, size eight. But the lobby was only
beginning to fill up with the early evening visitors now, and none of
the women were the right age or size. She slipped away from the
family and into the stairwell.

Jane hurried up the steps to the
second floor, then the third. Carey’s recovering patients were
always on the third floor or the fourth. She stepped out of the
stairwell and walked purposefully along the third-floor corridor. She
turned the corner and stared down the next hallway at the nurses’
station to be sure Carey wasn’t there, reading charts or
talking to someone. She went back the way she had come, then turned
the other three corners, looking in each open door until she could
see the nurses’ station from the other side. She caught a
glimpse of Nancy Prelsky hurrying across the hallway and into a
patient’s room. Jane waited a few seconds to be sure Nancy was
occupied in there, then stepped across the hallway and into the other
stairwell.

Jane repeated her tour on the
fourth floor, but she saw no sign of Carey. There were three
orderlies pushing head-high carts loaded with trays full of covered
plates along the corridor, then stopping at each room to make a
delivery. She looked at her watch: six twenty. Carey wouldn’t
come in to examine anybody during dinner.

She waited until the orderlies
had moved around the corner to the rooms on the other side of the
nurses’ station, then stepped to a door. There was a chart with
notes on it, and she recognized Carey’s scrawl. She hesitated,
then decided. If the person in here was eating dinner alone, then he
wasn’t too sick and he wasn’t asleep. She knocked and
heard a muffled response. She took off her hat and opened the door
just enough to stick her head in.

The man was in his thirties, and
his leg had a cast on it that went from a metal stirrup at the ankle
nearly to his hip. He had a fork in his right hand and a television
remote control in his left. When he looked down from the television
at her, he seemed pleased.

“Excuse me,” said
Jane.

“Sure,” he said.

“I’m just checking
to see if Dr. McKinnon has been in to see you yet.”

The man nodded and let his eyes
be drawn back up toward the television screen above the bed. “Yeah.
About… a half hour ago.”

“Thanks,” said Jane.
But this time she did not smile. She was looking past the man on me
bed. The windows on this side of the building looked out on the
parking lot. Through his, she could see Carey’s empty parking
space. She closed the door, slipped into the stairwell, and began to
run down the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairwell,
she paused, put her cap on her head, then stepped out and stared at
the floor as she hurried across the lobby and out the front door. She
trotted to the van, climbed in, and started it. She spent five
seconds checking the mirrors before she threw the van into gear and
drove off.

It took twenty minutes to get to
Amherst, and while she was driving the last glow of the sunset
disappeared and late afternoon turned into evening. As she made the
turn onto the street where she and Carey lived, she studied the
parked cars, noted the houses that had lights on and the ones that
didn’t, searching for anything that seemed wrong or out of
place.

Jane parked a few doors away
from the house and moved to the back of the van to look at it.
Carey’s car was not visible in the driveway, and there were no
lights turned on. Then she saw Carey’s BMW make the turn at the
corner and come along the street. She moved back from the tinted
window and watched it glide past her.

Jane forced her attention away
from him. Her eyes devoured the sights of the neighborhood,
scrutinizing them for the tiniest change. Had a shadow passed behind
the set of blinds in the window across the street? Had a curtain
moved? She pivoted to stare up the street, then down it to see if a
new car had come around the corner after his. His arrival had not
prompted any visible response.

The sky was black now – as
dark as it would get tonight – and it was still early enough so
that the normal activity in the neighborhood would keep her from
standing out. It was time to move. She switched off the dome light in
the van, slipped to the passenger side and out the door. She kept her
body in the deep shadow of the van and studied the street again. When
she was sure that there were no headlights approaching, she drifted
quickly across the open pavement and up the driveway along the tall
hedge that hid even her silhouette.

As she approached the rear
corner of the house, she saw a square carpet of light suddenly splash
onto the grass in the back yard. He had turned on the kitchen light.
She would step in the back entrance, let him see her, but cover his
mouth before he could say her name. She would tug him outside, out of
the house before she spoke, in case that woman had planted a
microphone like the ones she had found in the house in California.

Jane turned the corner of the
house and looked at the big maple tree in the back yard. The glow of
the red and yellow leaves above her made her stop and step back into
the shadows along the house. She looked up. The light had come on in
the bedroom.

Carey had come in the front
door, walked through the living room, the dining room, and into the
kitchen. He had not had time to climb the stairs and turn on the
light in the bedroom. Jane quickly moved to the kitchen door,
unlocked it, and stepped inside. The room was empty.

She hurried to the dining room,
but he had already passed. She heard his footsteps above her on the
upstairs landing. She ran across the living room to the stairway and
climbed, taking the steps three at a time. As she reached the top,
she saw him – the long legs, the familiar shape of his back,
the unruly light-brown hair that stood up from his head, glowing in
the light from the bedroom doorway.