Authors: Thomas Perry
She still didn't have him. She had used the computer to get specific bits about him, like stakes to drive in a circle around him, the beginning of a definition. But she had not found a picture of him, had no certainty about where he was. Each time he could have made a mistake and been caught, he had avoided it and escaped. He had been supernaturally careful and thorough about removing all traces of himself from the apartment in Los Angeles he had shared with Jim Shelby's wife. In the apartment the police had found no fingerprints, no DNA traces. He had been nowhere near the building where Jane had been held and tortured, and nowhere near the house where his men had held Sarah Shelby. The underlings Jane might have used to connect him with crimes were dead.
Jane spent some time organizing and studying the information she had found about him, then teased it to make it more useful. She used aerial maps and surface photographs to get pictures of his house and his condo and the streets on all sides of them. She got more aerial photos for each hour of the day or night, and signed into traffic cameras that were permanently trained on the major thoroughfares nearby.
She used the driver's license numbers to bring up replicas of his actual licenses so she could see his photographs. He had thick, dark hair; a smooth, unlined face; and large, light blue eyes. She wasn't surprised that he was handsome. He had gone to Austin with confidence that he would have no trouble meeting and manipulating a woman he only expected must exist-a pharmaceutical saleswoman who worked at the nearby company headquarters. According to the licenses, he was tall-six feet two inches-and he weighed 180 pounds. She could see from the photos that he was trim, with big shoulders and chest. It was a body acquired not by playing some game, but by consciously shaping with weights and repetitive exercises. His skin was evenly tanned. It had been done not by being outdoors in some active way, but more likely by using a tanning bed. He controlled his appearance like an actor.
She studied the pictures of his face until she was sure she could recognize it even if he added something to change his appearance-a beard, glasses, mustache, hair dye. Then she packed her clothes, computer, and guns into the car, and drove toward Los Angeles. All of the men he had sent after her had been carrying California driver's licenses.
Jane was heading for a city where she had committed the crime of the year. Before she left Phoenix, she stopped in a wig shop and bought three wigs. One was light brown with natural-looking highlights, one was darker brown with a hint of red, and one was short and blond. She knew from experience that she could get away with even light blond hair with her blue eyes, but the wig made her look very different. In another shop she bought two pairs of sunglasses, one that wrapped around her face, and one with big saucer-shaped dark lenses that made her face look small.
As she drove the last hundred miles to Los Angeles on Route 10, she thought about the ways of getting to Daniel Martel. When she reached Santa Monica she took her Camry to a Toyota dealer and told the service manager to do all of the checks, replacements, and maintenance it would take to make the car into one he would buy his daughter. When she picked it up a day later, she filled the tank and had the car washed and waxed. She knew that a dirty car caught people's attention in Los Angeles, and made it look as though the driver had just blown in from elsewhere.
She drove to the neighborhood in west Los Angeles where Daniel Martel's house was. She spent over an hour driving around the area before she swung past his address for the first time. His house was a two-story Spanish-style building with a red tile roof and a balcony with an ornate wrought-iron railing. She could see signs on the lawn for a security company, and a few decals on the lower windows and front door.
Jane returned to her hotel and laid out a set of dark clothes, a baseball cap, more of the surgical gloves she had used for cleaning, about fifty feet of the rope she had brought to the house in the Adirondacks, her folding knife, and her two identical Beretta M92 pistols.
At two a.m. Jane drove past Daniel Martel's house, parked a block away, and walked back to the house. She stepped around the outside, peering in windows. There was an alarm keypad that she could see beside the front door, but she could also see that the display said, "RDY": ready. It was not turned on. Did that mean he was at home, that he was in there waiting for her There were no lights on, and there was no car in the garage. She wondered if it meant that he had no fear of a break-in, or that he had known she would be coming but didn't want the security system to summon anyone. She decided it probably meant he wanted her to find her way in.
She continued around the house, looking inside. She knew she could break a window, reach a latch, and slip inside without worrying about the alarm going off. If he was gone, that would be safe, but she sensed something was wrong. She picked up a fallen branch from beneath a tree in the yard, cleaned it of twigs, tied her rope around it, stood to the side of the balcony, and threw it over both railings so it dangled free on the other side without hitting anything and making noise. She reached up and removed the stick, tied the two parts of the rope into a slipknot, tugged it to tighten it, and began to climb. As she did, she used her arms more than usual to save her right leg. When she was just below the balcony she reached up, clutched the edge, and pulled herself up to grasp the railing. She braced her left foot against the wall of the house, used the railing to climb up, and stepped over it onto the concrete surface of the balcony. Then she pulled the rope to bring the knot up to her, untied it, drew up the rest of the rope, and left it coiled on the balcony where it wouldn't be seen from below.
She leaned close to the double doors on the balcony and stared in at the master suite. There was a king bed with gauzy covers and two long pillows. She moved to look from the left side of the left door along the wall to the closed bedroom door, then beyond it toward the right, when she saw the spring gun aimed at the inner side of the bedroom door on the far side of the room from her.
It was a pump shotgun set up on a table using a bench rest designed for zeroing in a rifle at a range. There was a thin wire running across the closed bedroom door, through an eyebolt screwed into the woodwork on the wall beside the door, through another one in the wall behind the shotgun, then attached to a piece of wood set inside the trigger guard just in front of the trigger. When the door opened, the shotgun would blast the intruder at the height of the table, about thirty inches above the floor. For someone standing upright, the blast would hit the lower abdomen. It was a prolonged, painful death.
Jane stayed at the double door on the balcony studying the room to spot signs of more traps. She saw nothing, so she slid the blade of her knife between the two doors, lifted the latch, then stepped aside and placed her back to the wall before she tugged the right door open.
She remained still and listened. There was no gunshot, no sound of an alarm system, no low growl of a dog that he'd locked in. She leaned in far enough to see all sides, but kept her feet planted until she was sure there was no threat in this room but the spring gun. She stepped carefully to the shotgun, clicked the safety in so the red stripe disappeared, removed the piece of wood from the trigger guard, and let the wire go slack.
The spring gun had been aimed at the closed door that led out of the bedroom to the hallway. She stepped to the door and listened. She stepped back a pace. Something was wrong. There was no sound out there. Nobody was on the other side waiting for her, but she sensed that the spring gun she had disarmed couldn't be all. That wasn't the way this man thought. He was a murderer who had framed his victim's husband for the murder and then tried to get him killed in prison. One strike, one murder, one trap would not be enough for him.
As she thought, she knew what it must be. There would be a second spring gun in the hallway, aimed at the outside of the bedroom door. If she entered the bedroom through the balcony doors, as she had, she would see the spring gun in the bedroom and disarm it, and then confidently open the door. The second spring gun, the one in the hallway that she had never imagined, would go off and kill her. If instead she had entered the house another way and come along the hallway toward the bedroom door, she would disarm the spring gun in the hallway and then be killed by the one trained on the door from inside the bedroom. It was a simple, elegant way to build a booby trap: disarming the first gun didn't make you safe; it made you only a confident victim of the second.
She used her knife to unscrew the doorknob and remove it from the inside, then pushed the outer knob out of its hole and let it fall to the floor in the hall.
Through the circular hole where the doorknob had been mounted, she could see the dimly lit hallway. Exactly as she had predicted, there was a second table with a shotgun mounted on a bench rest, aimed at her. She followed the trip wire with her eyes. It ran from the piece of wood in the trigger guard to an eyebolt screwed into the surface of the table behind the shotgun, and then straight to the bedroom door. Since the door opened inward, any attempt to open it would pull the trigger and kill the person coming out of the bedroom.
Jane studied the spot where the wire led to the door, then worked with her knife to carve away the wood from that part of the door. It was taking time, but Jane had already determined that Daniel Martel wasn't here. If he showed up now, she would hear his car through the open balcony doors. She kept working until her blade scraped the screw end of the eyebolt. When she freed the bolt from the door, she heard a clink. She put her eye to the hole and saw the bolt and the slack trip wire on the floor.
She pulled the door open and walked to the shotgun. She pushed the safety on and continued down the hall. There were four more bedrooms up here, but none of them had any furniture. There were just polished hardwood floors and spotless white walls.
Because stairways were easy places to plant booby traps, Jane used great care in descending to the first floor. She kept her feet on the outer edges of the stairs, where she could see what she was stepping on. When she reached the bottom, she found an insulated wire and followed it to a pressure pad Martel had installed under the runner on one of the steps.
She could feel the man's mind at work. He had a problem. He had murdered a woman and framed the woman's husband. The husband was always the easiest one to get the police to accept, because most female murder victims were killed by male family members or friends. Probably Martel had always planned to have the husband murdered in prison, because as long as the framed man was alive, someone might take a second look at the crime. When Jane had taken Jim Shelby away from him, he had sent eight men after her, and this must have struck him as no more than prudent. She had buried the eight, and disappeared again. Clearly he was now aware that she was coming for him, and he was retreating and leaving booby traps in his wake, not staying to wait for her.
She searched, moving methodically through Daniel Martel's house from room to room, opening all the spaces where things might be hidden. She searched for photographs of Daniel Martel. She searched for medicines in the cabinets that might indicate a chronic illness or an addiction. She examined the figurative paintings to see whether any of the landscapes might be pleasant places he had visited once and might return to if he felt he had to lie low for a period of time.
When she had been everywhere on the ground floor, she climbed the stairs again to look in the master suite. She opened the walk-in closet and the lights went on auto-matically. The poles where clothes were hung had been disarranged, with some clothes taken and the other hangers pushed to the sides. She studied the clothes that remained to see whether he had been searching through the cold-weather clothes, taken hiking boots or beach sandals, taken expensive suits and shoes or left them. To her it appeared that he had left out the extremes. Judging from the locations of the empty hangers, he had apparently taken something from the jeans section, several shirts, a couple of sport coats, and a windbreaker or light jacket. The shoes were in rows of small cubbyholes. There seemed to be a pair of sneakers or running shoes gone, and a pair of dress shoes, probably brown, since that was the color of the others in that row.
She pushed some hangers aside. There was a compartment built into the back wall. It wasn't a safe, just a doorless cabinet that must have been hidden by a set of shelves on rollers that he had pushed aside. She looked inside to see if she could determine what he had chosen to take. There was an empty envelope with the return address of the West Valley Bank printed on it, the kind a teller would offer if you withdrew too much cash to carry in a pocket. There was a second envelope, this one with the return address of the county clerk in Dayton, Ohio. The name of the addressee had apparently been typed on a sticker, and it had been torn off. The receipt inside said that it was for a duplicate of a birth certificate, but not the name of the baby. There was another envelope that was from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and said, "Do Not Forward." It had to be a credit card he'd ordered in a false name.
He was running, and that put him in a world she knew better than he did.
She took her rope from the balcony, closed the doors, went down the stairs, and stepped across the never-occupied living room and out the front door. When she reached her car, she started it and drove to the first freeway entrance and turned north. At this hour, it would only take a few minutes to reach the 101 freeway, and then the junction with the 134. In an hour she'd be nearly to the edge of the desert at Victorville, and she would be in Las Vegas by morning.
19.
Daniel Martel seemed to Jane to be someone who went to some trouble to be unreadable. His house in Los Angeles wasn't a home; it was an investment. It had expensive paintings but no books, no old clothes, no magazines, no computer, and no personal effects. It was a place for him to stay while he was in Los Angeles without having to be visible or sign a hotel register. It was also a place to store some of his wealth. And real estate was the easiest commodity to manipulate-to give equal credibility to either a big profit or a big loss, whichever he wanted. Martel had apparently never before been close enough to danger to need to run. But Martel was cagey, cunning.