'Time for you to go for your evening walk,' she said.
'Right.' Jake started off on his stroll. He walked along the long row of parking spaces looked for all of the signs that Jane had told him about: a car with a man sitting in it, maybe pretending to wait for somebody while he read a newspaper. He scanned the windows for faces and then searched the surrounding block for a gray Honda Accord; a man who thought he might have unwelcome visitors might not park his car in a space with his apartment number on it.
Inside the hallway, Jane read the letters on the doors. They started with F. She worked backward until she found B. She heard someone across the hall in Apartment A walk close to the door, probably to look at her through the glass peephole. She tensed her legs and prepared to move quickly. After a moment there was a creak and she could hear the person moving off.
She turned to Apartment B and rang the bell. She could hear it jangling beyond the door. She knocked, then rang again, but there was no sound that she hadn’t made. She turned and knocked on the door of Apartment A.
A woman about her age, wearing a sweatshirt that had a stain on it Jane identified as baby formula, opened the door and stared at her with a resigned look. 'What can I do for you?'
'I’m sorry to bother you,' said Jane, and she could tell the woman was thinking, Not as sorry as I am, 'but I’ve been trying to reach my friend, who just moved into Apartment B. His phone isn’t working, and—'
'Oh,' said the woman. She brushed a long strand of corkscrew-curled hair out of her left eye, and it bounced back perversely. 'They haven’t moved in yet.'
Jane felt the tension beginning to grip her. 'Are you sure?'
'Believe me, in this place I’d know it. People carrying furniture around sounds like an earthquake.'
'Is there a manager?'
'Yeah. In the next building. Apartment A.' Jane heard the first faint sounds of a baby waking up, amplified by an electric monitor. 'Oh,' said the woman vaguely, and the harried look returned to her face.
'Thanks,' Jane said, and turned away so the woman could close the door. It didn’t prove anything. John Young didn’t have any furniture yet.
She went outside the building and walked around the corner to the window of Apartment B. The window looked into the living room. It was just four bare walls enclosing a shiny imitation-parquet floor. The bedroom door was open, and there was nothing in there, either. Even the closet doors were open, something that the people who gave apartments their gang-cleaning between tenants did to air them out.
The next thing Jane saw made her turn away. It was a small piece of white paper on the floor that had been slipped in under the door. She was starting to walk when she saw Jake coming around the building toward her. She pointed to the window, and he looked inside.
'That’s my note on the floor,' she said. 'He never made it.'
'Are you sure?'
'I’m going to check with the manager, but it looks that way.'
'I’ll do that,' said Jake.
In a few minutes Jake returned. 'No. He would have had to check in to get his power and water turned on. He hasn’t been here.'
They walked out of the apartment complex, down Islington Street, with no destination. She hadn’t thought of this—not that he wouldn’t be in his apartment now, but that he had never been here at all. Even if the four men had found Harry’s and John’s addresses on the same list, how could they have stopped John so quickly? He would have had a good head start. They could have made it to the apartment before he did, but how could they catch him on the road?
Jake cleared his throat, and she knew she had to ask, so she said, 'What is it?'
'Well,' he said. 'Is there any chance that he didn’t entirely trust you?'
She was stung. 'No chance,' she said. Was there? Could he possibly think that she had some ulterior motive for everything she had done? 'No.'
'I see,' said Jake. 'So he knew you really well.'
'Yes, we had an affair,' she said, 'since that’s the bush you’re beating around. But I’m being logical. He ran into trouble, but he knows the reason he got out was because I risked my life for him. He was carrying a lot of money, and some people would get suspicious of anybody who knew it. But I didn’t even let him spend any of it. I put up all the expenses. And he came to me; I didn’t look for him.'
'What do you want to do?'
'How can I know?'
Jake walked along, looking around him instead of at her. 'There are only a couple of really strong possibilities. One is, they found him and killed him before he got here.' She caught him watching her for a reaction. 'In that case, there wouldn’t be much to do, would there? They’d be long gone.'
'I hope your other possibility beats that one.'
'You said he used to be a policeman?'
'Yes,' she said. 'Eight years.'
'Is it possible that he hasn’t quite gotten over it? Bear with me now. Suppose he stopped and picked up a paper and read about this fellow getting killed, just like you did. This Harry was some kind of friend, right? Or at least somebody who had done him a favor ...'
'Jake!' she gasped. She stopped and gave him a quick hug. 'You did it. That’s right. It’s true. I talked to him for hours, endlessly. I was trying to tell him that he couldn’t afford to act like a cop anymore, figuring things out and then going off to do something about it. Even while I was saying it, I could see there was something in the back of his eyes, some door back there that closed. He was protecting something. And now I know. He didn’t have any other way to see things.'
'So he just might have gone on south to Santa Barbara.'
'Might have? I’m telling you, I’m sure that’s exactly what he would do. He’s thinking like a cop. He never stopped thinking that way, because he didn’t know how. He read, or heard on the radio, that Harry was murdered in Santa Barbara. He owed his life to Harry, and the people who killed Harry are also after him. He’s down at the scene of the crime trying to figure out who they are.'
'Unless something happened on the way here.'
'But that’s what’s been bothering me all along. The four men killed Lewis Feng and deciphered his list. Then what did they do? They went right away to Santa Barbara and killed Harry. That’s not a guess. We know they did because Harry’s dead. Meanwhile, John was driving from Vancouver to Medford. How could they find him unless they were actually following him? They couldn’t and they weren’t following him.'
'How do we know that?'
'Because John left right after I did. First they had to break in at Lew Feng’s, kill him, and find his list. Harry was obviously the priority because they got him. Even if they found both names and addresses right away and split up, two to get Harry and two to get John, he would have at the very least an hour’s head start—fifty miles. He would be in one of thousands of little cars driving the five hundred miles down the coast, so they couldn’t have gotten him on the road.'
'Some other way? It must be a nine- or ten-hour drive. A motel?'
'It’s the same problem. They would have to stop at every hotel or motel for five hundred miles and look for a car they’d never seen before. They never could have found him. They could have murdered Harry in Santa Barbara and still have flown here in time to surprise John, but they didn’t. John hasn’t been here, but neither has anyone else.'
'How do you know that?'
'The lady across the hall has a baby, so she’s here during working hours and would have heard them. She heard me walking up the hall—one woman, not four two-hundred-pound men. Everybody else in the complex is here at night. When those men tried to sneak into my house, they had to break a window to do it, didn’t they?'
'Yeah,' he said. 'I guess they did.'
'Well, they didn’t break any windows here or jimmy a door or anything else.'
'No, they didn’t.' He waited and watched her.
She avoided his eyes and craned her neck to look up and down the street. 'Did you happen to see a pay phone on your rambles? This doesn’t look like a street where cabs cruise for passengers.'
