She wanted him to say 'And I felt like hearing yours,' maybe because if he said it she would know there wasn't another woman in the room with him. The thought made her feel contempt for herself. He said, 'My sentiments exactly. I must have just missed you the other day. When I came in there was your message on my machine. When will you be back in town?'
'I'm not sure.'
She heard the
'I heard it.'
'Look, give me the number where you're staying, and I'll call you when I'm back from the hospital.'
'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said. 'I'm out and I don't have it with me. I'm never there anyway. I'll have to try you again in a day or so, when things cool down.'
'Do that.'
'Goodbye.'
'For now,' he said.
As Jane stepped away from the bank of telephones she had to dodge a group of Asian teenagers who swept past laughing and talking. She wished that she didn't have the kind of mind that always suspected deception. She reminded herself that it was ridiculous even to think of Carey that way - as though she had a right to expect that he would never see another woman. He had offered, and she had not agreed, had only said 'We'll talk about it.' There was no proof that a woman was in the room with him, anyway. She was just inventing a way to make herself miserable. As she walked back to her hotel, she wished that she hadn't known that when a pager was clicked off and then on again, it beeped to signal that it was working.
She spent the late evening trying to think about Alan Turner, but found her attention slipping back to Carey McKinnon. She was angry at herself for being suspicious, and angry at him for being the sort of person who made her suspicious. He was probably innocent, and if she cared about him enough to be this uncomfortable, what was she doing thousands of miles away from him, forming agonizingly clear pictures of what he might be doing with some other woman? She should be there. She was surprised by the strength of her urge to be with him. She wondered why it was stronger now than it had been yesterday. Was it because his voice had triggered some unconscious longing for him - maybe love, but maybe just some crude sexual reflex, the equivalent of Pavlov's dogs' hearing a bell and salivating - or because it had set off an even cruder instinct to gallop back and defend her mate from the competition? Twice she was tempted to call the hospital to see if he was on duty but fought down the impulse.
When the hour was late enough so that she could not imagine a good excuse to call any of Carey's numbers, Jane managed to remind herself of what she was doing in Los Angeles. She had decided it was necessary to find out who had been trying to kill Timmy Phillips. If that was true a week ago, then it was still true. Turner was the prime suspect, and anything she could figure out about him might save a little boy's life. Thinking about anything else was a waste of time. When she had reached this conclusion, she promptly fell asleep.
As the morning sun came up over the next ridge in a blinding glare, Jane laid all of her information about Alan Turner on the table of her room and studied it. She had Turner's name, the license number of the car he drove, the address of his office, and the address of his house on Hill-crest in Beverly Hills where she had followed him two nights ago. The resume that Hanlon had sent to Marcy Hungerford said that Turner was a 1969 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and that he had an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California.
She forged a letter from Turner to the U.S.C. registrar's office requesting that a transcript of his graduate work be sent to the personnel manager of Furnace Financial, Ltd. in Chicago. The Furnace corporation was a business she had founded some years before. It had a genuine legal existence, but the ownership was cloudy and the physical plant consisted of a post office box that she had rented in a small Chicago mini-mall, with the arrangement that everything that arrived was to be sent unopened to another post office box in Buffalo. Then she called the owner of the little shop where the box was and asked him to call the Hilton when anything with a U.S.C. return address arrived.
As soon as she hung up she dialed Carey's number. When his machine clicked on, she tried to think of the right kind of message. She knew he wasn't working now, or she thought he wasn't. It occurred to her that if there had been a woman with him last night, she would still be there. She simply said, 'It's Jane Whitefield.' She paused to let him change his mind or go to an extension where the woman wouldn't hear. 'I guess I missed you again.' As she hung up, she closed her eyes and felt a headache building. All right, she thought. I said I would call him, and I've called him. Enough. I have work to do.
She drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Glendale and filled out a form. On a line near the top, she provided the license number of the BMW Turner drove, and in the big space at the bottom she said he had scraped her car in a parking lot. The DMV answered with the name and address of the owner, which was only the leasing company Green Import Auto, but it also listed the lessee, Alan Turner, and included his driver's license number.
After only two days, the U.S.C. transcript arrived in Chicago. Jane asked the owner of the shop to open it and read it to her. From this she got Turner's Social Security number. With the driver's license number and Social Security number, she was able to have Furnace Financial request a credit report on Alan Turner.
The credit report told her he was paying a mortgage of one million, eight hundred thousand dollars to Southland Mortgage. This must be the house on Hillcrest. He had several credit cards and paid the balances each month to avoid interest charges. He had checked the box on his mortgage papers that said 'Divorced,' which made things simpler: he didn't have a wife with a second income. But there was also a surprise. Turner was repaying another loan of six hundred thousand dollars to the Bank of Northern California. It was a mortgage on a second home.
She looked in the telephone book for the Bank of Northern California and found listings for several branches, as well as a Bank of Northern California Mortgage Services in San Bernardino. She called the mortgage office and asked for the credit department. Anybody who loaned money must have a credit department. In a second a woman answered.
'This is Monica Butler at the San Francisco office,' Jane said. 'I've got a loan application here from a customer who lists a mortgage from us already for six hundred thousand. I'd like to know what the property is.'
The young woman said, 'The name?'
'Alan R. Turner. Need his Social Security number?'
'No,' the woman said. She was typing the name into a computer. If the person on the other end of the line thought you were from the same company, none of the privacy rules applied. She was merely transferring information from one internal file drawer to another.
'The property is at 1522 Morales Prospect, in Monterey.'
'Do you have a zip?'
'Sure. It's 93.940.'
'Thanks.' Jane hung up and wrote down the address. The picture she was forming of Turner was coherent and consistent: he made a lot of money and he was cautious and premeditated. He saved some by driving a leased company car. He used his high income and stability to take out big deductible mortgages on two of the most desirable addresses in the Western Hemisphere, so he probably didn't pay much in taxes. But those were relatively modest prices for their neighborhoods, so he wasn't taking big risks. He wasn't in love with debt, because his credit cards had never carried a balance to the next month. He didn't look like an embezzler. If he had been quietly robbing the Phillips trust fund for years, he must have had the foresight to know that some day a stranger might take a look at his assets. Either he was extremely sophisticated or she had chosen the wrong man at Hoffen- Bayne.
The following morning Jane rose before dawn, walked to the door of her room, picked up her copy of the
13
Jane had checked out of the Hilton and had her car on Laurel Canyon Boulevard by five a.m. She hadn't dared stop to read the whole article, but she had scanned it on the walk down the hallway to the desk, and took a longer
