Authors: Thomas Perry
Sybil Landreau's tall, skinny shape appeared in the hallway. "She's all set."
Demming said, "Let's see."
Sybil held out her right hand, and a woman stepped out of the guest room. She was pretty and small featured. Her eyes had been made up with shadow and eyeliner to make them seem bigger, and her tinted contact lenses made her irises blue. Her hair was shoulder length and chestnut colored, and it had a tendency to fall over one eye when she cocked her head. Her lipstick had been brushed on to imitate Christine's full lips. She walked with small steps, and she wore a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie.
"Oh, my God," said Demming. "You look exactly like Christine. Exactly."
"Think so?" said Claudia.
"Absolutely. You're right on the money. Don't you think so, Richard?" Demming's forced smile begged for the right answer.
"Perfect," Richard said. He smiled, too. "I mean you were perfect before as yourself, Claudia, but this ... This is something."
Sybil and Claudia went back into the guest room and closed the door.
"She doesn't look like Christine," Richard said. "She's short, but she's not the same body type as Christine. What are we doing? Why
say she does, if she doesn't? She's ten years older, and Christine gained thirty-five pounds in the pregnancy, at least."
"She'll be wearing padding, and that'll make her look fat," said Demming. "The wig is a perfect match for Christine's hair. She's the same height as Christine, and with the makeup, she's fine. You've got to remember it will be midnight, and there will only be a sliver of moon tonight. Once she's out of the house it will be like walking around in the bottom of a well. If the woman gets close enough to see the difference, Claudia will be close enough to shoot her."
"Jesus, Steve. I don't know about this. I don't think we should make her think she'll fool anybody. It could make her take chances."
Demming put his arm around Richard's shoulder. "We don't have a choice. You're the one who talked to this woman, and we're locked into giving her a Christine. Claudia is our only possible Christine. All we can do is make her feel confident and back her up."
Sybil Landreau reappeared and stood a few feet off, waiting. When Demming saw her he nodded. "Now we've got some more things to do before dark. We'll see you later." He and Sybil went outside, and in a moment Richard heard Demming's car accelerating onto the coast road.
Richard sat on one of the living room couches, leaning back with his face toward the ceiling and his eyes closed. He didn't want to succumb to the fear, the shortness of breath, the throbbing in his head that made him feel sick. He knew that he needed to rest now, before the long night.
He heard something quiet, a swish, a rustle, and smelled perfume a half-second before he felt the lips against his. He opened his eyes just as Claudia's face pulled back a few inches. Her hair was blond again, and her eyes were brown.
"A sweet kiss, but a little short," she said.
"Are you making a fool of me?" he asked.
"No. You'll have to do that yourself." She lowered her head again and kissed him deeply, lingering there and letting her tongue tickle his lips and then slip into his mouth. They kissed for a minute or two. He put his arms around her and noticed that she had changed her clothes, too. She was wearing a light sundress held up by two thin straps. He moved his hand along her spine and verified that there was nothing under the dress. She tugged it back down and sat up, then looked out the large back windows at the ocean and squinted. "It's so bright. Come to the bedroom."
He got up and followed Claudia into the hallway. When she turned toward the guest bedroom where she had changed, he gently placed his hands on her hips and steered her into the master suite. He turned around to close the door and lock it.
When he turned back, she was kneeling on the bed, pulling the dress off over her head. She met his eyes. "Sex calms the nerves. I knew I could get you to help me out, Richard. You're such a whore."
Jane stood in Sharon's kitchen and fought the impulse to call Carey. After a few seconds she defeated the urge. If she told him she was calling because she might not be alive in a few hours, what would that accomplish? If she wasn't up to dying without tormenting him, then she had become a different person in five years. The only way to increase her chances of survival was to concentrate on what she had to do.
She went into the bedroom and laid out her black clothes and her running shoes, then went back to the kitchen table, checked the pair of Beretta M92 pistols, and loaded the two fourteen-round magazines. She took a shower, scrubbed in the bathtub, and then showered again to be sure she had washed off any trace of makeup, shampoo, or deodorant. She was going to be moving in the dark tonight, and she wasn't going to let a scent betray her.
Dressed in her black clothes, she returned to the kitchen for the small backpack and packed the kit she had devised for the evening. She had a spool of fifty-pound test monofilament fishing line, her
razor-sharp folding knife, and the small plastic container of grease paint. She had bought a cell phone under the name Helen DeLong, and that was the one she placed in her kit. She had bought a battery-operated baby monitor and receiver and two thick chains with heavy padlocks.
Jane took her kit, her guns, and her bicycle to the garage and loaded them into the SUV. She knew she needed a safer place to hide her vehicle this time, so she drove to a hotel on the road to Rancho Santa Fe, rented a room, and parked in the parking structure where her SUV would not be visible. Then she put on her pack, took her bicycle out and rode it to the estate bordering the Beale house where she had climbed the wall on her earlier visit. She walked her bicycle into the oak woods off the road, left it in a dry creek bed, and covered it with leaves and fallen branches, then walked toward the Beale estate.
She came onto the estate by climbing the tree and using the overhanging limb she had used earlier. Before moving on, she found her half-stripped sapling and made sure it was in place in case she needed a ladder to reach the top of the wall again.
Once she had moved through the pine woods at the back of the Beale land, she crawled to the edge of the lawn to study the buildings. There was no sign that anyone was waiting. It was only three in the afternoon, nine hours early, but Jane wasn't sure yet that she was alone. She needed to reach the house without being seen. After she had waited an hour without hearing a sound from the house or seeing anyone pass a window, she decided it was time to move.
She stepped quietly along the back of the big garage, skirting the open lawn, and then walked to the back of the pool house. She didn't want to go any farther and leave the pool house behind her without first being sure no one had chosen it as the place to wait in
ambush. She stepped to the doorway and peered inside, then slipped in and opened cabinets and drawers. She stared through each of the windows to determine what parts of the house and yard could be seen from there. She was almost ready to leave, when she opened the cabinet under the sink in the bar and found a gun. It was a .45 Glock, loaded, with a round in the chamber and the safety off. She took out the magazine, cleared the round, buried the magazine in the flower bed beside the pool house, and then returned the gun to its hiding place.
When she reached the side of the house, she stepped along it until she found the electric meter and circuit breakers. She could see the wheel in the meter turning very slowly, as though the only things still drawing current were the electric displays on the built-in appliances.
She opened her pack, took out her roll of monofilament fishing line, tied it to the master power switch beside the circuit box, and then ran it around a bar in the iron fence surrounding the pool, and finally along the side of the main house to the garden. She tested the line once by tugging it to turn off the power to the house, then went back to the box and closed the switch again.
The next step was to find a good way into the house. She approached the sliding door to the main room. Through the glass she examined the latch that locked it to the doorframe. She jiggled the door on its track. It was an expensive, well-fitted door: It wouldn't move from side to side. She tried grasping the handle and lifting the door straight up, and found that she could lift it nearly an inch. The wheels that held it on its track could be raised or lowered by adjustment screws recessed on the inner side of the door, and it was clear to her that nobody had adjusted them for years, so they had gotten very loose.
What she needed now was something she could use as a pry bar. There was nothing in the garden, but she remembered seeing a barbecue set in one of the drawers below the counter in the pool house. She went back and selected a big butcher knife. She returned to the sliding door, knelt, and lifted it again, pushed the knife into the space beneath it and moved it until she found the spring-loaded wheel under the door. She used the blade to hold the wheel up, and pushed the door off its track. Then she slipped the blade into the space she'd created between the door and frame, and lifted the latch. She lifted the door to set the wheel back onto its track, put the knife into her pack, and stepped inside.
She explored the interior of the house. The moving crew had taken everything that could be removed. The bare floors and walls made her footsteps echo as she went from room to room. On the ground floor there was a row of bedroom suites with bathrooms between them, and then at the end of the long hallway she came to one room that had a damaged wall.
The plaster had been dug away in two places under the window, as though someone had tried to burrow through the wall. Jane went to the window and looked out, then realized what it was. The holes in the wall were almost exactly in the places where the bars over the window were anchored. Somebody had been trying to remove the bars from the inside. Jane looked more closely and saw scratches on the plaster that looked like knife marks. These weren't part of some remodeling project. There were no drill holes or chiseled spots. Someone had tried to dig out of here with a knifeâChristine.
It was obvious that Richard Beale had no intention of setting Christine free. The damaged plaster reminded Jane of the possibility that Christine was already dead. She might even be buried somewhere on this estate. She had been missing from her apartment in
Minneapolis for about a month, and the plot of land around this house was huge. A girl like Christine, still weak from giving birth, would have been easy enough to kill, and then she could have been buried deep in one of the flower beds where the soil was soft and moist and free of stones and roots. They could have buried her and then transplanted a few flats of poppies and petunias over her. These were rich people. They could have had a crew plant a full-grown tree, or even cover Christine's body with a new section of driveway.
If Christine was dead, Jane knew, she would probably never find the body. San Diego had the Pacific Ocean to the west, and hundreds of miles of lonely deserts and mountains to the east. But she had seen the movers carrying a crib and boxes of toys. They wouldn't do that unless the baby was alive.
The second time through the house, Jane counted steps and judged angles, looking out windows to determine what could be seen and what couldn't from each of them. She studied the great room without its furniture, trying to detect hiding places. First she checked the inside of the fireplace, but found no guns. Then she checked the guest bathroom just off the big room, and found the second pistol. She unloaded it and taped it where she'd found it. She went into the garage, noticed a rope and a light stepladder, carried them out to two sections of the wall around the property that she had never visited, and hid them. She suspected that she might have to go over the wall again, and she wanted as many ways up and out as possible. Jane turned on the battery-operated baby monitor, climbed the shelves to the top of one of the built-in bookcases in the big room, and placed it there.
She took advantage of the waning daylight to study every part of the place. All the time while she worked, she was listening for the sound of someone else arriving. There was sparse traffic on the road
beyond the high hedges. Each time she heard a car approach, she listened for the noise of the front gate opening. But there were only the calls of the birds in the surrounding groves of trees and an occasional flutter of leaves from a sudden warm gust off the desert. Jane unlocked several windows and two service doors on the wings of the house so she would be able to come in and out at will.
When everything was done, Jane went upstairs into the master bedroom, where she could see the grounds through windows on three sides. As she studied the estate, she picked out the places where Steve Demming might set up a sniper's nest to kill her, and calculated the angles from the house to the places where she could find the ladder and rope she'd left near the wall. She saw the hiding places she would have to check for enemies, and the false hiding places where a person would be more vulnerable rather than less: the low hedges near the house that would obscure a person but would make noise and reveal movement.
She waited, looked, and listened while the sun went down and the house gradually sunk into darkness. When it was eleven o'clock, she stood and put on her backpack, then looked out the windows again before she left the master bedroom. She went down the stairs at the center of the building and then walked from room to room in the dark, testing her memory of the distances and spaces. Then she went out to the garage and made her way across the broad brick pavement to the garden planted beside the front gate to hide the machinery that opened it. She sat down behind a tree near the gate.
At eleven-thirty the front gate began to glide to the left on its track. A black Cadillac Escalade drove in and stopped on the brick pavement in front of the garage where it was closest to the front door of the house. It was where Jane had expected the vehicle to park, shielded from the line of fire on three sidesâthe house, the garage,
and the front hedge. Jane watched from her hiding place by the gate as car doors opened, lights went on, and people emerged. The driver was a man whom she had seen in New York. He had to be Demming. He was tall, had light hair, and an athletic body that had thickened a bit in middle age. He wore a short-sleeved polo shirt with a sport coat over it, presumably to hide a gun. He went to the front door, unlocked and opened it, and stood guard there while the second man joined him.