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35

Jane stepped into the airline terminal, stopped near the door, and scanned the monitors for the schedule of departures. There seemed to be no flight for hours that stopped in Buffalo, so she chose a nonstop flight to New York City that was leaving in ten minutes. She bought a ticket under the name Julie Sternheim and ran for the gate.

As soon as the plane was in the air and the seatbelt sign above her head went out, she used the Marie Spellagio credit card to activate the telephone built into the seat in front of her and dialed the number of the house in Amherst. She heard the phone ring ten times, and she let it ring five more before she gave up. She glanced at her watch. It was already four A.M. here, so it would be seven in Buffalo. By now, Carey had probably scrubbed and entered the operating room.

If the woman had been in Buffalo for two weeks, she must have gone there straight from Denver—been sent there from Denver. Earl Bliss had been the designated shooter, and he seemed to have had all the money, so probably he had been the one who made the decisions. He must have been smart enough to know that from the moment Pete Hatcher had seen the woman’s face, she had become a liability. So he had sent her to western New York.

As Jane followed the path of logic, she felt her stomach tightening. The woman had not simply been excused from the hunt and sent home: she lived in Los Angeles. She had not been bundled off into hiding in a place that just happened to be near Jane’s hometown. They had sent her something there by overnight mail. People in hiding didn’t need anything urgently enough to require that it be sent in a way that left a record.

Jane tried to invent coincidences that would confute her logic. Had she given Pete any false identities that could have tied him to the western part of New York State? That was impossible. She never sent chasers across her own trail. Did Pete have any close friends or relatives there? When she had asked him about friends and relatives, there had been none east of Nebraska.

The address in Orchard Park might mean something. Orchard Park wasn’t a big, bustling city where people came and went by the thousand without attracting attention. It was a suburb, a small upper-middle-class bedroom community. It wasn’t a place to remain anonymous. It was a place to establish an identity.

This woman could not have been sent to spot Pete Hatcher. She was the only member of the team whose face he had seen. There was only one reason Jane knew of for this woman to be in western New York. That night on the mountaintop, when Earl had been deciding how to kill her, he had called her Jane. The woman must have known much more.

Jane began to sweat. The woman had been there for two weeks. She’d had enough time to find out—what? Where Jane lived, certainly. And that meant she knew who Jane was married to. Jane snatched up the telephone again and inserted her credit card. When she had punched in the area code, she stopped.

Every time Jane had taken Hatcher in a different direction, Earl had turned up with the rifle. Jane’s throat was dry, and her head was throbbing. She had made some terrible mistakes. The woman had probably found her address in a day, and on the next day had broken into the house and bugged the telephones. Jane had obligingly called every few days, and that had somehow given her a location. Now this woman was waiting in Buffalo, probably watching Carey, and Jane could not even call to warn him, because the woman would be listening.

Jane forced herself to be calm and tried to think of another way. She could call Carey’s office. No, that was foolish. If the woman had been listening for a call from Jane, she could not have assumed it would come to the house. The woman would also have tapped the lines in Carey’s office.

Carey was at the hospital right now. There were hundreds of phone lines at the hospital. Tapping into all of them would be a job for a team of electrical engineers, not one person who knew how to plant a bug. Jane searched for a way to use the complexity of the place. Carey would be in surgery for the next couple of hours, where an outside telephone call could not reach him. After that, he would be all over the building, walking the halls to examine and discharge patients, read charts and scribble in files, look at X rays and test results. There was no way to predict precisely where he would be. If the operator didn’t have a pretty clear fix on him, what would she do? She would page him.

Jane could not let that happen. The person this woman wanted to find was Jane. The woman could not assume that Jane would not show up in person instead of calling. The woman could monitor her telephone taps with a tape recorder, but she would have to watch Carey with her own eyes.

Suppose Jane didn’t call Carey directly. She could call the nurses’ station in the recovery room. Carey would certainly show up there immediately after surgery, and then again later to clear the patient to be transported to his own room upstairs. But what could Jane say to a nurse? She could hardly ask some stranger to tell Dr. McKinnon he might be in mortal danger because his wife hid fugitives.

For the moment, Carey was as safe as he could be. Nobody could get into an operating room. The big metal doors wouldn’t open unless someone inside hit a switch on the wall. After that, he would be surrounded by people, going about his business as he had been doing for two weeks while this woman had been watching him.

The woman had not come to Buffalo to harm Carey McKinnon. There was no extra pay for that. She had come to watch him and use him to find out where Jane was. Carey was only valuable to this woman if he was alive and unsuspecting. He would be safe until … when? The moment when the woman saw Jane.

She sat strapped in her seat, rigid. Maybe she should not be going home. Maybe the best favor she could do for Carey McKinnon was to stay as far away from him as possible. If she stayed away for long enough, the woman would have to give up and go away. But then Jane realized that she was wrong. If this woman had been keeping Carey in sight for two weeks, then the woman could not be sure that Carey had never caught a glimpse of her, never seen her face. If the woman got tired of waiting, she would not just go away. Before she did, she would put a bullet in Carey’s head.

Linda stared at the red zero on her answering machine. If Earl had done it and gotten back to civilization by now, he should have left a message for her. But maybe he had called home. There was no question that he would call as soon as he could reach a telephone. He would be thinking about what she might be doing to keep Carey McKinnon occupied, and he would want that to end as soon as possible.

She dialed the number of her house. The telephone rang once, twice, and then there was an unfamiliar high-pitched tone. A recorded voice that sounded like a middle-aged woman came on and stated authoritatively, “The number you have reached is not in service. If you think you have reached this number in error, please hang up and dial again.” Linda took her advice.

After the third try, Linda began to feel panicky and worried. Was it possible that in all this traveling she had forgotten to pay a phone bill? Her mind searched for a way to reassure itself, but it came back with nothing. She weighed the danger of calling the long-distance operator in Los Angeles and explaining the problem. She could think of no reason not to, so she did. After a few seconds she was connected with the billing department. The woman on the other end consulted a computer and said, “You’re right. I’m seeing it as out of service. It’s not a billing problem. I’ve already checked your records, and you’re up to date on your payments. But the phone is out of service.”

“Doesn’t whatever you’re looking at say why?” asked Linda. “I’m expecting a very important call, and if they can’t get through I’m going to be a very unhappy customer.”