listening to the static while the telephone company's computers threw switches to move the call across the country to Carey's house, and she sensed in herself a feeling that was not right. She had not been calling because she wanted to give him a message of love before he dropped off to sleep, or even to soothe herself with the sound of his voice. These were the only legitimate reasons for calling Carey tonight. If the eagerness she had been feeling was morbid curiosity or the grim satisfaction of confirming a suspicion, then the only decent thing to do was leave him alone.
She opened her suitcase and looked at her clothes. She decided that evening in Monterey was an occasion for basic black. She put on a black turtleneck sweater, a matching jacket, and black pants, then tied her hair back. The accessories were what would make such an outfit. She laid out the few items of female paraphernalia she had brought and made her selections. She fastened her hair with a black ring and a thin five-inch-long peg that had a T-shaped handle at one end and was sharpened at the other. Before she put the perfume bottle into her purse she opened it and sniffed cautiously. It had a soft wildflower smell with a little touch of damp earth that tickled the nose a little. It was a mixture of mayapple and water hemlock roots that she had mashed and strained into a clear concentrate. Eating the roots was the customary Iroquois method of suicide.
For her feet she chose a pair of twenty-dollar black leather Keds. They had gum soles like sneakers, but the soles had no distinctive lines or patterns. They were merely plain, flat, and rough, a texture that could make it hard to distinguish the prints they left as a human track, let alone identify them as the prints of a particular woman's shoe.
She left the lights on in her motel room in case she returned, but put her suitcase in the trunk of the car in case she didn't. She made her preparations carefully because she could not have said what she was preparing for. As she started the car and pulled out of the lot, she began to feel uneasy. If she had seen another woman adorning her hair with a spike designed to be driven into a person's chest, or popping a vial of hemlock extract into her purse, she would have said that the woman was on her way to kill someone. People who brought along weapons without knowing why had a tendency to find out why after they arrived.
She ran a quick inventory of the thoughts she had about Turner. She suspected that he was a man who stole from children, but she had not discovered any evidence that he had ordered the deaths of Timmy and his parents, or told anybody to kill Mona and Dennis rather than let them into the courtroom. She wanted to watch him and study him. He didn't seem to be a physical threat, and she was not suddenly feeling the urge to go and supply herself with a gun; that would have been a bad sign. The poison proved nothing. Over the years she had promised clients that she would die rather than reveal where she had taken them. To say this without keeping within reach the means to accomplish it would have made it a lie.
Jane drove down Morales Prospect past the address and took a long, careful look. The house was set far back on the deep lot, partly concealed by a few tall pine trees that had been left standing when the house was built. The second floor was fake Tudor, with a high, steep mansard roof that didn't go with it, and the ground floor had a brick facade about six feet high. There were dim lights on in the second-story windows, but the bottom-floor windows were dark. Even the porch light was off. As she passed, she could see that the house was sheltered on three sides by the remnants of the pine grove. The trees ran right up to the edge of the driveway and nearly touched the garage.
She drove up the road looking for a place to leave her car. A half mile farther she found a closed gas station with five or six cars lined up along the side waiting to be fixed. One of them had its hood off and in its place was a tarp of heavy-gauge plastic taped down to keep the sea air out of its engine. She pulled into the lot with her lights off, parked next to this car, and moved the tarp to her own hood.
She walked back along the road, keeping in the shadows of hedges and trees inside the property lines of the big front yards so that any headlights unexpectedly shining on her would fall on her black hair and black clothes and not on her face and hands. But this part of Monterey was a winding seventeen-mile scenic route, so people probably drove it in the daytime when they could see it.
In ten minutes Jane was standing among the trees in the side yard of the house. She felt the soft, cushioned layer of long needles on the ground and smelled the pine scent in the dark, still air. She made her way to the garage and looked in the window. She could see the gleaming finish of the black BMW inside. This was the place where Turner had come to wait out the scandal, leaving the questions and cameras to his lawyer. She walked slowly and quietly around the house, staying back among the trees.
She studied the lower windows, then the upper ones. She scanned the eaves and gutters for spotlights that might automatically come on if she made a noise, but she saw nothing that worried her.
She wanted to see Alan Turner. She returned to the spot where she felt most sheltered by the trees, at the back corner, and watched the lighted upper windows on two sides of the house. There was no glow of a television set, no shadows on the ceiling from anyone walking across any of the rooms. She felt a strong urge to see what he was doing and what he looked like tonight.
Maybe she had come too late, and he had lain down to rest with the lights on and fallen asleep. He had driven much farther than she had, and had probably done a lot of it at night, so he would be tired.
She felt drawn to the light. When she walked to the side of the house to peer into a window, she saw the little yellow-and-blue sticker of Intercontinental Security. It made her take a step backward while she tried to analyze the uneasiness this gave her. It had begun to seem that every building she had seen since she started looking into Timmy's problems had one of these stickers on its window. Alarm systems didn't surprise her - she had one herself - but California seemed to be blanketed with Intercontinental stickers. Had it been that way for years without her seeing it?
But of course Turner's houses would be protected by the same company that Hoffen-Bayne used. He probably hid the cost of the alarm systems for both houses in the monthly fee for Hoffen-Bayne. She decided that her uneasiness was only the result of having her attention focused on the signs. If somebody she knew got a disease she had never heard of, suddenly she would notice articles in the newspapers about it and overhear people talking about it until it seemed that the whole world had been infected.
She pushed the security company out of her mind and forced herself to think about the sticker in a way that was of more immediate use. It warned her that Turner had an alarm system. Whatever interior traps and gadgets the system had, they would probably be turned off if he was still up and walking around, or he would risk setting them off himself. The perimeter circuits would certainly be turned on.
She studied the building for its weakness. The alarm system would protect the windows and doors. The high, steep roof didn't have skylights or big vents, and if he were in an upstairs room, he would hear her walking up there. She looked down. This house was like most in California. The ground never froze, so they had no basements. Houses were bolted to three-foot foundations with a crawl space under the floors for pipes and wires. Near the side door by the kitchen was a little wooden trap to cover a two-by-three-foot concrete access well. She lifted the cover off quietly. As she looked down she had a momentary foreboding of spiders and rats, but she pretended there were no such things. She crawled under the house and pulled the trap back over the opening.
Beneath her was bare, powdery dirt. It was dark under the house, but she could see moonlight coming through little screened openings placed at intervals in the foundation. She found the gas pipe from the kitchen overhead and followed it slowly toward the center of the house, making out thick drain pipes and thinner water pipes here and there. Finally she reached the place where the gas pipe jointed and went upward. There was a square opening in the floor beside it about three feet wide.
She reached up to touch the place where the opening ended. It was a big square fabric filter. She pushed up on it and tilted it, then brought it down under the house with her. She reached up again and felt the row of burners. There was only about a foot and a half of space between the business part of the gas furnace and the floor, but she estimated that she could probably fit. She felt carefully around the inside of the furnace until she found the panel that slipped off so the filter could be removed and cleaned. That must be the front.
Jane placed her fingers on the lip and the top of the panel and slowly pushed upward. The panel slid up a quarter inch, when suddenly there was a flash and a click, and the pilot light came on. The burners just above her head began to hiss as the gas came out of them. She ducked down quickly and lay on her back as the gas ignited and the level blue flame spread across the top of the row of burners. Now she could see in the weird blue light. She could tell that she had estimated the shape and structure of the furnace only slightly wrong. She studied it, moving her head from side to side and lifting it as far as she dared.
There had to be some kind of safety button to kill the furnace when the door was off so that it didn't start up and burn the house down. As she searched, the blower motor went on and the fire grew hotter. She couldn't let it
