cabinets that might indicate a chronic illness or an addiction. She examined the figurative paintings to see whether any of the landscapes might be pleasant places he had visited once and might return to if he felt he had to lie low for a period of time.
When she had been everywhere on the ground floor, she climbed the stairs again to look in the master suite. She opened the walk-in closet and the lights went on auto-matically. The poles where clothes were hung had been disarranged, with some clothes taken and the other hangers pushed to the sides. She studied the clothes that remained to see whether he had been searching through the cold-weather clothes, taken hiking boots or beach sandals, taken expensive suits and shoes or left them. To her it appeared that he had left out the extremes. Judging from the locations of the empty hangers, he had apparently taken something from the jeans section, several shirts, a couple of sport coats, and a windbreaker or light jacket. The shoes were in rows of small cubbyholes. There seemed to be a pair of sneakers or running shoes gone, and a pair of dress shoes, probably brown, since that was the color of the others in that row.
She pushed some hangers aside. There was a compartment built into the back wall. It wasn't a safe, just a doorless cabinet that must have been hidden by a set of shelves on rollers that he had pushed aside. She looked inside to see if she could determine what he had chosen to take. There was an empty envelope with the return address of the West Valley Bank printed on it, the kind a teller would offer if you withdrew too much cash to carry in a pocket. There was a second envelope, this one with the return address of the county clerk in Dayton, Ohio. The name of the addressee had apparently been typed on a sticker, and it had been torn off. The receipt inside said that it was for a duplicate of a birth certificate, but not the name of the baby. There was another envelope that was from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and said, 'Do Not Forward.' It had to be a credit card he'd ordered in a false name.
He was running, and that put him in a world she knew better than he did.
She took her rope from the balcony, closed the doors, went down the stairs, and stepped across the never- occupied living room and out the front door. When she reached her car, she started it and drove to the first freeway entrance and turned north. At this hour, it would only take a few minutes to reach the 101 freeway, and then the junction with the 134. In an hour she'd be nearly to the edge of the desert at Victorville, and she would be in Las Vegas by morning.
19.
Daniel Martel seemed to Jane to be someone who went to some trouble to be unreadable. His house in Los Angeles wasn't a home; it was an investment. It had expensive paintings but no books, no old clothes, no magazines, no computer, and no personal effects. It was a place for him to stay while he was in Los Angeles without having to be visible or sign a hotel register. It was also a place to store some of his wealth. And real estate was the easiest commodity to manipulate-to give equal credibility to either a big profit or a big loss, whichever he wanted. Martel had apparently never before been close enough to danger to need to run. But Martel was cagey, cunning.
He'd had enough imagination to foresee the possibility that if he kept making money through criminal acts, he might someday have to run. Maybe when he was with Susan Shelby, he had seen in her whatever quality it was that ultimately had made him kill her, and prepared. Maybe she was a talker, who might reveal his business. It might have been as simple as Susan getting irritating, and Martel beginning to think about what beginning a future without her might require. Jane was aware that Martel was psychologically sophisticated. His simple booby trap had been dangerous because it displayed acute attention to how the human mind worked.
But he was still a novice at running. He had not had time to think through the predicament of a runner and invent strategies for each obstacle. He would drive to Las Vegas-almost certainly, he had done so as soon as he'd realized his hired men must be dead-and collect whatever he thought he needed. The Las Vegas condominium would be another place for Jane to learn more about him.
She rechecked the two Beretta pistols she was carrying, put one in her jacket, and put the other under the seat. She drove as fast as she could without attracting the police. The drive to Las Vegas was a long roller coaster-an incline that rose five thousand feet to the Cajon Pass, then a descent into the edge of Death Valley at sea level again, then a couple of smaller ups and downs, ending at two thousand feet on the Las Vegas Strip. She was driving outside the fence past the taxiway at McCarron Airport when the sun rose. The look of everything- blinding and sun-bleached with a promise of cruel heat just outside the car window-reminded her of the morning only a few weeks ago when she'd been wounded, alone on foot with no money, no food, no water, no name. Things were so different now that as the two impressions merged, she felt stronger and more determined.
She knew approximately where Daniel Martel's condominium was. The address included the name Silverstrike Club, and she remembered seeing a building with that name on it just east of the Strip. She looked it up on her laptop and saw that it was between a midsize hotel and a nightclub. There were a couple of pools and a nine-hole golf course behind it.
The problem was going to be getting inside to the upper floors where the condominiums were. Las Vegas was an island in a river of cash, so it was full of people who had come to steal. It was, consequently, also heavily populated with security technicians, guards, rent-a-cops, and others whose job it was to prevent incursions by the thieves. It would be best to assume she was always under surveillance.
There was little time for the things she would have to accomplish here, so she started immediately. She drove to the hotel beside the Silverstrike Club, checked in wearing her short blond wig, and then went out shopping for a dress. The Forum at Caesar's was close, and at its heart was a collection of high-end stores for women. She spent an hour finding the right dress, purse, and shoes, and returned to her hotel with enough time to take extraordinary pains with her hair, makeup, and accessories.
She was a bit thinner than she had been when she'd gone to get Jim Shelby out of the courthouse, so she supposed she looked more appealing by Las Vegas standards than she had before she'd been shot and starved. Before she left the room, she made sure the marks that Wylie and his friends had made on her were hidden by her long sleeves and high neckline.
As she walked the two hundred feet to the front entrance of the Silverstrike Club, she could feel the drying and tightening as the surface moisture of her skin was seared away by the sun. The white building was about twenty stories high with a broad, roofed-over drive in front like the gigantic hotels on the Strip. Jane stepped inside, heard the automatic door swing closed behind her, and felt the refrigerated air embrace her. The lobby was an empty marble cavern except for a wide concierge desk with a woman in a man's sport coat standing behind it. Jane approached and said, 'Hello.'
'Good afternoon.' The girl was as well trained and disciplined as an acrobat. Her smile was an artful blend of dental bleaching techniques and willpower. 'How can I help you this afternoon'
'I'm supposed to meet Mr. Martel for lunch at one. Can you please call him for me'
'Of course.' The voice was lilting. There was nothing in the range of human activities that she would rather do. She punched numbers with a fingernail manicured by a nameless artist. Next came the moment when the eagerness was replaced by uncertainty. She hung up. 'He's not answering.' She had already filed this incident in the archives of thoughtless errors men commit. Her left eyebrow gave a twitch of commiseration. 'Would you like to wait for him in the bar'
Jane looked only mildly surprised by his absence, but certainly not ready to disregard the slight. She glanced at her watch with the eye of a prosecutor silently building a case: the time was now entered into the official record. 'Well, all right,' she said, as though the outcome had been anything but sure.
'I'll take you there.' The girl was around the counter and gliding across the marble floor, so Jane had to move quickly to keep up. The girl reached the door a half step ahead so she could push it open before Jane's progress could be impeded. They entered a space with a large dining room on the left, and a long bar on the right with a liveried bartender wielding a cocktail shaker before a couple of men in polo shirts and shorts.
Just inside the door was another perfected young woman at a lectern. The concierge whispered something about 'Mr. Martel' and 'bar.' The hostess was launched a few steps toward the bar, turned her head only, and held her hand out to Jane. 'I'll watch for him and let him know where you are.'
'Thank you,' Jane said. She sat at a small metal table in the bar and took her phone out. She pretended to look down into the display at e-mails or text messages, but she had pressed the button for 'camera' and was using the viewer to study the men in the vicinity. There were only about a dozen in the bar, but all of them had taken a moment to watch the concierge, the hostess, and Jane. That was fairly promising.
