Shadow Woman (56 page)

Jane quickly moved along the
second-floor hall as he stepped into the room. She heard him say,
“What’s going on?” It was too late to prepare, too
late to think. She slipped into the room and stepped in front of him.

The woman’s pretty face
contorted into a mask of fright as she snatched the bedsheet to cover
herself. Her green eyes shot to Carey’s. “Who is she?”

Jane’s mind fought to sort
out what she saw: blond hair, size eight, the right age. But this
wasn’t the way she had expected to find her – in bed,
with her clothes in a pile on the chair. This had to be some kind of
deception, and Jane sensed instinctively that she had to make the
woman believe it was succeeding. Maybe she would not think she had to
kill them if she thought they were fooled. Jane could only play the
role that the woman had invented for her, and pretend to be the
wronged wife. Jane said, “I’m just the woman who lives
here – his wife.” After a pause she added, “You
seem to have us mixed up.”

But Carey was gulping and
staring, his face longer and emptier than she had ever seen it.
“Jane. I just got here myself. I didn’t – ”

Jane kept her eyes on the woman,
but she patted Carey’s arm. “Stop,” she said. “I
know you didn’t arrange this.”

“I’m glad.”

“You might come home late
for dinner, but you wouldn’t have been late for this.”
She struggled to figure out what was going on. The woman had been in
here with the lights off until Carey had come in the house. The woman
had come into the house to do something or other, and Carey had
interrupted her.

Jane’s heart beat faster.
If the woman had been interrupted – surprised – then
pretending she had come to seduce Carey would be a good tactic. All
she had to do to be convincing was take off her clothes. But she had
seen Jane now, and she wasn’t doing anything. Jane stared at
her. It was just possible that she wasn’t armed, and that she
was afraid Jane might be.

Maybe she just couldn’t
reach the gun. Jane kept her eyes on the woman and walked to the
chair by the wall where the woman had left her clothes. There were
suede leather pants, a silk blouse, underwear, a black leather purse.
Jane reached down and tossed the clothes onto the bed where the woman
could reach them. She squeezed the purse and tested its weight, then
tossed it on the bed too. She felt her muscles go slack with relief.
She had been right. The woman had not brought a gun. Jane could still
get Carey out alive.

Jane took Carey’s arm and
began to lead him out of the room. “She’s going to want
to get dressed.”

The woman’s voice startled
her. It was soft and low, teasing and seductive. “Aren’t
you going to say anything, Carey?”

Carey and Jane both stopped and
turned as the woman swung her legs out of the bed. She stood up,
casually naked. Jane felt shock, a flash of rage. Just what did this
woman think she was doing? The woman seemed to read her mind. She
shrugged. “He’s not seeing anything he hasn’t seen
before.” She reached into the pocket of the suede pants and
held up a key. “I guess I won’t be needing this anymore.
Did you find the one I left the other night?”

“Yes,” said Carey
irritably. He walked toward her, but kept the bed between them and
reached across it for the key. The woman’s eyes were on Jane,
and the big red lips began to turn up at the corners.

The sights in the room seemed to
burn themselves into Jane’s brain. The familiar shapes –
the chair, the picture of Carey’s parents on the bureau,
Carey’s golf bag full of gleaming silver clubs in the open
closet beside her – all were distractions now. The key. What
did the woman gain by the business with the key? Forget the key. Jane
lifted her eyes toward the bed.

The woman was standing beside it
now. She had pulled on the suede pants, and she was buttoning the
white blouse. She stopped and tilted her head in a pantomime of false
sympathy. “I know how this must make you feel. But it really
wasn’t anything serious. I just saw a chance to have some fun,
so I thought I’d borrow him. We never thought that this could
happen.”

Jane stared at her, mystified.
Why was she trying to make it look as though they’d already had
an affair? What did it buy her? She should want to get out of here.
Jane’s heart beat faster. Something was wrong.

Carey moved to his dresser and
opened the box on top where he kept small things he didn’t want
to think about – single cuff links, loose screws, keys that fit
nothing. As he reached into his pocket to find the key, he said
coldly, “Please don’t imply that something went on
between you and me. It’s bad enough that you’re here in
the first place, but you’re not going to – ”

Jane raised her hand and shook
her head. “Please. Stop.” She tried to sound annoyed, but
she was feeling a growing fear. “There’s no point in
discussing this. Let’s leave this woman alone so she can get
dressed and go.”

The woman glared at her. “Not
‘this woman,’” she said. “Susan Haynes.”

Jane’s body grew tense as
she stared at the woman. She couldn’t know that it was the name
Jane had seen on the machine for making false credit cards. But she
shouldn’t be saying it. She should not want Jane to hear any
name.

Jane saw the woman’s hand
slip under the bedsheet and grasp something hidden underneath, and
she drew in a bream as she recognized the shape of it. As the hand
began to come up off the bed, Jane was aware of Carey, still turned
away to put the key in the small wooden box on his dresser.

Jane’s right hand shot out
beside her and plucked a golf club out of Carey’s bag. The
three-iron flew up inside her grasp until the handle reached her
hand. She tightened her grip and swung it downward, hard.

Jane’s eyes caught
everything during the instant when the shining club swung down. She
saw the woman’s eyes read the trajectory, fix on Jane’s
eyes, and convey the terrible message: Not you… him! The gun
had already begun its move to the left toward Carey, so Jane’s
swing sliced through empty air and onto the wooden footboard of the
bed.

The club struck on the metal
shaft, and the heavy head broke off, bounced once on the bed, and
fell to the floor. Jane saw the woman’s thick lips curl upward
as the gun continued its rise toward the back of Carey’s head.

Jane screamed, “No!”
as she hurled herself toward me woman. She jabbed out at her with the
only object she had. She felt the long, thin metal shaft stab into
the woman’s body below the rib cage. The woman shrieked and
shrank backward, but the pistol swung around toward Jane’s
face.

Jane had committed herself. She
could only push the shaft of the broken golf club harder, up under
the rib cage and into the heart. The woman clawed at it, tried to
push it out, then fell backward.

Jane watched Carey hurtle across
the bed, kneel beside the fallen woman, touch her carotid artery, put
his ear on her chest. He turned to stare at Jane, and his face was a
mixture of horror and incomprehension.

“She’s dead,”
he said. “I can’t… Why would she – ”

“She was staying near you
because she thought I would call and tell you where I was,”
said Jane. She looked away so she did not have to see the expression
of shocked understanding forming on Carey’s face. As she
surveyed the room, she tried to sound calm. “Since the easy way
wasn’t working, I’ll bet she planted something in here…”
Her voice sounded as though it belonged to someone she didn’t
know.

Carey stood up, his big hands
held toward her, the fingers open in an unconscious gesture as though
he wanted to stroke her and soothe away her hurt. “Oh, my God,
Jane… I let her in. Days ago, before I knew – or thought
I knew – that she was out of her mind.” He seemed to have
an afterthought, and it startled him. “I didn’t sleep
with her, I just didn’t think – ”

She came to him, put her arms
around him, and rested her head on his shoulder. “I know,”
she whispered. “I got fooled, and you got fooled.” It
felt wonderful to be in his arms, familiar and new at the same time
and, most of all, safe. She wanted to close her eyes and stay like
this, but she could not. She released him and frowned thoughtfully at
the dead woman on the floor as she walked around the bed.

Carey stood stiff and still,
staring at the body. “This is what it is, isn’t it? It’s
not just helping somebody run away.” He paused. “That was
what you were trying to tell me that night before you would marry me.
That some day I might have to watch my wife stab somebody to death in
our bedroom.”

She stared at him, her face
expressionless, waiting.

His eyes flicked away from her
toward the body on the floor, and Jane could tell he was seeing its
last moments again and that what he had seen was different from what
she had seen. Jane had seen the cruel eyes narrowing, and quick hands
in motion and then a gun muzzle that looked cavernous, and Carey had
seen the beautiful, smooth, living white skin being pierced, running
with fresh, bright blood, and then turned into this cold, waxy effigy
of a woman.

Jane said, “Say what
you’re thinking. In a few minutes it will be too late.”

Carey held up his hands, his
eyes full of pain, but he was not able to find the words he wanted.
He seemed to know he had to try. “I love you.” So he had
discovered it too, she thought. That was what you said when you
couldn’t say anything else. He tried again. “You’re
the best person I ever met… and this was the worst thing I’ve
ever seen anyone do. And you did it for me, and that makes me feel
awful, and grateful, and sick. And if we somehow get through this,
I’ll do everything I can to make sure you never do anything
like it again. No more fugitives.”

She turned her face for a
second. Then she picked up the telephone, unscrewed the earpiece,
removed a small electronic transmitter, set it on the floor, and
stepped on it. “So much for that mystery. We’ll probably
be finding these for months.” Then she sat on the edge of the
bed and screwed the earpiece back on.

Carey came closer. “Maybe
I should be the one to talk to them,” he said. “I’m
the one who knew her.” He held his hand out for the telephone.

Jane set the receiver back on
its cradle, then looked at Carey sadly. “I’m not calling
the police.”

“Why not? It was
self-defense.”

She took a deep breath and let
it out. “This is a time when we don’t have the right
kinds of answers for the questions they would ask. This woman was a
professional killer. If the gun has ever been registered, it wasn’t
to her. And if we get our names and pictures in the newspaper, there
will be other people coming – ones who knew her, maybe others
who have been looking for me.”

“Then who are you
calling?”

“Nobody.” She
watched his eyes. They looked as though they were gazing into the
emptiness for the first time: there was nobody to call, no agency or
institution that could do anything now but hurt them, no friend they
could burden with this knowledge, because the risk it carried was too
great. Jane said, “Here’s what you do. Go right back to
the hospital. Check on your patients again, haunt the nurses’
stations, read charts, write notes. Act as though you had never left.
Don’t come back until after ten.”

He shook his head in amazement.
“You think I can leave you here alone?”

Jane stood and walked toward
him. “Neither of us wanted this, but here we are. We’re
in trouble. I know the way out, and you don’t.” She
pushed him toward the doorway, hard. “So go. We have to use
every second.”

He stopped, took a last look at
her, then turned and walked down the hallway toward the stairs.

At ten thirty, Carey McKinnon
unlocked his front door and stepped into his house. He called,
“Jane?” but there was no answer. He discovered that he
did not want to raise his voice and try again. It took an extreme act
of will to ascend the stairs and enter the bedroom. For a moment it
seemed as though he had lost his senses. There was no corpse, no
blood. The bed had been made with crisp new sheets and blankets. The
floor had been scrubbed. It was as though nothing had happened.

Gradually, he began to sense
that he was not alone. He whirled and saw Jane standing in the
doorway. She was wearing a blue dress with a flower print that he had
always liked, but which she hardly ever wore. At her feet was a small
leather overnight bag. She said, “Come on. We’re not
sleeping in that room tonight. You’re going to take me to a
hotel.”

He waited. “That’s
all you’re going to say about it?”

She shrugged, picked up the
overnight bag, and handed it to him. “I’ll just say it’s
the last thing you’ll hear from me tonight that includes an
order, or the word ‘no.’” She turned and walked
down the hallway of the old house toward the stairs.

“What about tomorrow?”

He could hear the smile
returning to her voice as she said over her shoulder, “Ask me
tomorrow.”

The
radiance of the sun just rising behind the horizon outside the east
windows made entering the big conference room at dawn feel like
walking into a dream. The light was beautiful, golden. In a few
minutes it would shine through the broad, moist leaves of the jungle
plants outside the glass with such intensity that the droplets left
over from the three-thirty watering would evaporate in minutes. But
the sky to the west was still that deep purple-blue of the desert
night that made the colors of the Las Vegas lights glow brighter,
like millions of flares burning at once.

Max Foley looked around the room
and verified with mild satisfaction that he was the first to arrive.
He supposed it wasn’t surprising. The complexity of Buckley’s
mind seemed to Foley to have been built up like a muscle by a
lifetime of worrying about eighty things at once. He had probably
spent much of the night getting up over and over to see if any news
had come in. Salateri had probably spent most of his night screaming
into his telephone to find out why it hadn’t. All three
partners had been living in their suites upstairs for two months, and
it was starting to feel like a siege.