“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “They don’t tell us what the problem is. It could be a lot of things—a malfunction in the equipment in your home, for instance. Or with the line that goes to your house. If a tree on your property fell and pulled it down, I would have no way of knowing from here.”
“Well, I certainly have no way of knowing from here, do I?” asked Linda.
“I understand that,” said the woman.
“Can’t you send somebody to check?”
“Is there anyone there now to let the repair technician onto the premises?” Linda could tell it was an official question, the sort that brought some rule into play.
“No.”
“Then we wouldn’t be able to send anyone, no.”
Linda closed her eyes and let her voice carry some of the frustration and defeat that she was feeling. “If you were me, what would you do about this?”
Now that the woman had her victory, she issued a reprisal. “When you go out of town it’s a good idea to leave a key with a friend or relative. You might call a neighbor and ask her to look across the street to see if there’s anything obviously the matter.”
The defeat was complete. “Yes, thanks,” she said. “Maybe I’ll try that. Good-bye.” She hung up. Something was very wrong. She goaded her imagination to think of a way to find out what it was from the other end of the continent. She couldn’t call the police and have them check the house, because what they might find would send her and Earl to jail. She and Earl had always been so careful to remain unapproachable and anonymous that she not only had no acquaintances among the people who lived nearby, but she could not now recall any of their names.
She used her laptop computer to call up the Los Angeles telephone directory Northwest section and scanned it. Finally she called the number of a florist a half mile from her house, ordered a dozen roses to be delivered to Linda Thompson from Earl Bliss, and charged it to the Northridge Detectives credit card number she retrieved from the memory of her computer. She made it sound like an afterthought when she asked to talk to the delivery driver. She heard the man turn his head away from the receiver and shout, “Enrique! Phone!”
She explained to Enrique, “These flowers are supposed to be a surprise, so it has to be done in a certain way. It’s a house with a high gate. Drive up to the gate. Ring the bell. If anyone is home, give them the flowers. If nobody is home, there’s a great big mailbox right by the gate. Put the flowers inside, so she finds them when she looks for her mail. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” said Enrique. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” said Linda. “When will you be back from your deliveries?”
“About an hour from now.”
“Fine. I’ll call you, because I need to know where you put the flowers. Okay?”
“Okay.”
A little over an hour later, Linda called again and asked for Enrique. If a line was down, he could hardly have avoided noticing it. If—God forbid—there was a bigger problem, he would have seen something she could interpret. If the time for killing Pete Hatcher had run out and the one waiting in the house was Seaver, or if the house was under police surveillance, somebody would have appeared at the gate to talk to the delivery man. She waited for a minute and a half before Enrique picked up the phone and said, “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t deliver the flowers. The boss says he’ll cancel the order and credit your card for the money.”
“What do you mean, you couldn’t deliver them?”
“There’s nothing there. The lady’s house burned down. You want to find where she’s living now, we’ll be happy to deliver them there.” He paused. “Lady?”
Linda stared at the wall of her apartment, but no words came to her, because her mind was moving too quickly. “No thanks,” she said at last. “Just cancel the order.”
She tested each of the possibilities. Had it been a simple accident—a short-circuit or something? But why would it happen now? The odds against that were astronomical, with nobody in the house to leave anything turned on. Maybe Earl had failed again, and decided it was time to burn the house with two bodies in it that matched his description and hers. No. That had not been a plan, it had just been talk. Earl never panicked. More likely, he should have done it but hadn’t, and this was Seaver sending them a message.
What would Earl want her to do now? The answer came to her slowly, in simple, incontestable statements. Earl never gave up. If the house had simply burned by itself, she and Earl would need the money for killing Pete Hatcher more than ever. If Seaver had burned the house, then Earl would want to kill Pete Hatcher so he could add the cost of rebuilding to the fee and make Seaver pay for it. No matter what had happened in California, when Earl came for her, he would want to see some evidence that Linda had been doing what he had told her to do in New York.
She stood up and began to pack her belongings. When she had finished, she locked her suitcase in the trunk of her car and came back to put the items she would need into her purse. She walked to the door and looked back before she turned off the light. The only thing left in the room that she had brought with her was the telephone answering machine. With the house gone, it could be Earl’s last way to reach her.
36
Jane was already standing when the hatch of the plane opened. She lockstepped up the aisle with the others, then broke free and hurried along the accordion tunnel and into Kennedy Airport. She rushed along the concourse, took the escalator two steps at a time, stepped to the ticket counter, and found that there was not a flight to Buffalo until 3:30. She bought the ticket, then walked to the bank of telephones along the opposite wall.
Jane called the toll-free reservation number of every airline that flew from Kennedy, then worked her way through the ones that left from La Guardia and Newark. Only two airlines had flights that were scheduled to take off earlier than hers, and both were already full. Jane was not surprised. Buffalo was not the sort of place people visited on impulse, so the flights tended to be booked in advance. She would have to wait three hours—no, only two hours, now.
She used the rest of her time to work the airport shops. She found some leather bomber jackets and selected one a size too big for her. It had big map pockets that started at the belly and ran up her ribs. The jacket would pass as cute if a woman wore it, but the look was decidedly male. The big shoulders and the roomy fit would disguise her shape; the thick, stiff leather would provide a distinct advantage against a knife. Anything metallic she put in the map pockets would serve as body armor. She found a smaller shop that sold monogrammed clothes, picked out a black wool baseball cap, and declined to have it monogrammed. She found a pair of soft black leather gloves. It was often a woman’s hands that gave her away at a distance. She decided the blue jeans she was wearing were sufficiently nondescript, as were the boots she had worn in the mountains.
The flight to Buffalo took less than an hour, but to Jane it was endless. Carey was out of surgery now, and probably in his office down the street from the hospital. If she wanted to warn him, this was the time. She could avoid his telephones entirely, by calling Jake Reinert. There was absolutely no chance that the woman had tapped Jake’s telephone. She could speak freely to Jake and ask him to go to Carey’s office and tell him in person. The problem was that she still was not sure what to tell Carey to do.
The woman was a professional, so she would be watching for particular signs, and she would know what she would do if she saw them. What would she do if Carey received a visitor, then abruptly closed his office and left for the day? She would follow him. The answer always seemed to come out the same.