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.”
37
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.
Foley walked to the private bathroom at the far end of the room and knocked, then opened the door with his key. He glanced at the key, as he often did, before he put it back in his pocket. There were only three copies of that key. He had seen them listed once on the roster for the hotel complex: Universal Grand Masters. They were the keys to the kingdom. They would open any lock that any other key in the hotel would open, and a few more besides. “We three kings of Orient-Tar,” as his kids used to say. That was—what? Two marriages back, before he had become rich enough to make giving away half his visible assets too steep a price for getting laid now and then. Foley stared in the mirror at his shave, combed his hair, and went back out into the conference room, then looked at his watch. It was after five o’clock, and he was getting impatient.