Jane put on her gloves and began to open drawers and cabinets, searching for all of the things that would give her more information about Martel. She moved into his bedroom. That was where burglars looked first, because it was the place most likely to contain valuables. The bedroom was painted dark gray, and it had two sets of curtains that could shut out all light from outside. The bed was a California king with a fake fur bedspread and silk sheets. Six pillows were piled on it at the head.
She opened the drawers of the nightstands. The one farthest from the door held a box of .45 ammunition, but no gun. The other held two pairs of handcuffs and a blindfold. She closed it, and the sense of foreboding she'd felt since she'd arrived intensified. It might be nothing. There were plenty of people who played games with those things, and it meant nothing about their lives. But Daniel Martel was a murderer, someone she knew had already killed a woman. How could it not mean anything She found herself staring at the bed. It had a steel head piece and foot piece with vertical bars. Some of the bars looked as though the paint had been marred by something scraping on them.
The closet door was on the other side of the bedroom. It was a walk-in the size of a second bedroom. There was a chest-high island in the middle, and the walls were covered with drawers, cabinets, and poles with hangers. Of course Daniel Martel would be unusually interested in his appearance; he made money seducing foolish women. She closed the closet door, but there was a full-length mirror on the back of the door, and she kept catching her own reflection in it, so she opened it again.
The clothes on hangers had been pushed to one side so there was a section that was bare in the middle. She opened the drawers on the wall to her right, and saw that some of them had been emptied.
The island in the center of the room kept drawing her eye. It was a chest-high rectangle about seven feet long and four feet wide, with drawers on all sides. She opened a few drawers. A couple near the top contained accessories-cuff links, watches, sunglasses, rings, an ID bracelet. Others had socks and underwear still in packages. But she soon lost interest in what was in the drawers. The most intriguing thing about them was their size. They were wide, but they weren't deep enough from front to back. Behind them, inside the center of the island, there had to be a long empty space. She tugged on one of the drawers to pull it free, but it wouldn't come out. She studied the island, ran her fingers under the overhanging top surface, and then knelt and looked up at it. There was a pair of hinges on one side. She walked to the opposite side, found the catch, and pushed it. The top opened like a chest.
In the center of the island, between the drawers, was a rectangular box like a tray. Stored in it were four pistols with extra magazines, two boot knives, a couple of knives that could be opened with a flick of the thumb, two electronic stun guns, and a short Japanese sword designed for fighting in close quarters. She lifted the tray out and set it on the floor, then looked in the tray below it.
There were bundles of letters and three photograph albums. She picked up the first stack of letters and leafed quickly through it, looking at the envelopes. Then she did the same with each of the others. The letters were in different handwriting, from several different people, sent to him at a succession of addresses. But all had been mailed in Indianapolis, Indiana.
She took up the first of the photograph albums. There was a shot of a man about thirty-five to forty years old, with a handsome face. It was Martel. He had longer hair than seemed stylish at the moment, but the picture might be old. On the next page, there he was again in a tuxedo, with an attractive woman with long, shiny blond hair wearing a strapless gown and holding a matching clutch. She was a stereotype, a trophy girlfriend at some big event.
Jane turned the page and saw them both again. The woman had her wrists and ankles tied to a bed, and she was bent over a pile of pillows. There was a gag in her mouth. She seemed to be in genuine distress, not posing or pretending. Sitting at the head of the bed near her was Daniel Martel again, as naked as she was, but smiling. He held a leather belt in one hand. Jane turned the next page, and then the next, and the next. Daniel Martel was a sadist. All the photos were of him and a succession of women, and all of them involved some kind of bondage. In a few of the photographs they were in the midst of intercourse, but even then, the woman would be restrained somehow, while Martel was merely naked, always smiling for the camera. The smiling pose reminded her of a snapshot of a fisherman on a dock standing beside the hoist where his prize tarpon hung.
She took the two photograph albums and the letters from Indianapolis. She lifted out the tray and found the other thing she had been waiting for-financial papers. She found a tax return and copied his Social Security number. Then she returned the three trays to the island, closed the top, and went back through the bedroom and living room to the door.
In the hallway she used Rick's key card to operate the ele-vator, and rode it to the lobby. She walked out of the club, returned to her hotel room, and quickly began to pack. She wanted to be far from Las Vegas before Rick woke up. As she prepared to put Martel's letters into her suitcase with the albums, she opened the top one and looked at the signature. "Love, Mom," it said. "P.S. We can't wait to see you on the 25th. Let us know if we should get your old room ready." Jane looked at the postmark. The letter was only six days old.
20.
As Jane drove toward the east, the sun behind her illuminated everything so brightly that it seemed to glow against the blue of the sky. Within a few hours the sun sank, and she was propelling herself into empty night. She had spent only one day in Las Vegas and had left without sleeping there. Probably Daniel Martel had not dared to spend a night there, either. He had simply stopped to pick up a few things, and then had driven on toward Indianapolis.
She spent four days and nights driving and thinking about what she was doing. For most of her adult life, she had tried to guide her runners away from spots that had become dangerous to new, safe places. She had never encouraged her runners to stand and fight. She had taught them to be rabbits, and shown them how to run from the hounds that were hunting them. Each time she succeeded, the hounds failed, and the rabbits got to live another day. This time would be different. This time, when the hound plunged into the next hole expecting to sink his teeth into the rabbit, he was going to find out that a hole didn't always harbor a rabbit. Once in a while what was down there was something that bit back.
When she reached Indianapolis she drove around the city a bit, trying to get a feel for the area. It was like a lot of other cities in the Midwest, a small central area of tall buildings all jutting upward like a set of teeth, surrounded by a wide circle of one- and two-story buildings stretching outward like ripples in all directions, fading into suburbs.
Daniel Martel's mother had written to him on an occasional but consistent basis. She mentioned his father regularly, and a few people who seemed to be friends and neighbors, but there didn't seem to be any siblings. Jane searched for the address on the envelopes as she explored. It was on Meridien Street.
The houses on both sides of Meridien were large, set back on big pieces of land that had been planted and cultivated into lush gardens and vast lawns that looked as though they had been laid down by golf course greenkeepers. The architecture was mainly copied from the British gentry, much as it was in rich neighborhoods in other cities. There was the usual riot of Tudor and Georgian and a few neoclassical mansions, but the American federalist period and the modern didn't seem to offer anything grand enough.