Shadow Woman

traction. Lenny gripped the door handle but kept silent. Earl reached the Logan Pass visitor center, pulled into the parking lot, and studied the cars that had been left there overnight. When he didn’t find the one he had followed in the morning, he drove past the building and found it parked at the edge of the woods not far from a garbage Dumpster. “That’s it.”

Lenny said, “We going to do something to the car?”

“Yeah. We’re going to look at it.”

He parked beside the car and looked inside. The keys were in the ignition. He opened the door, took out the keys, unlocked the trunk, and found it empty. He could see that they had cleaned the car out thoroughly. He said to Lenny, “Don’t touch anything. Just let the dogs out, but keep them behind the car. They don’t let dogs in the park.”

Lenny let the two big black dogs out of their traveling cages. They panted and huffed for a few seconds, wagging their tails and trotting in circles. Earl opened the doors of the abandoned car. “Get in,” he said. “Einsteigen in.”

The dogs leapt through the doors, sniffing the car, the upholstery, the steering wheel. Earl turned to Lenny. “Give them a few minutes to get the scent.” He took a flashlight from Lenny’s car, walked to the Dumpster, and opened it. He found the two suitcases covered with garbage. They would be of no use.

Earl gingerly reached down, pushed the garbage aside with his light, and opened the first suitcase. Clothes … they had left clothes inside. His heart beat faster as he took out his pocket knife.

In a moment he was back at the car. He said quietly, “Herauskommen.” The dogs jumped out of the car and waited for his command. He held the two shoes up so the dogs could take their time sniffing them. “Fund!” he said.

The two big black dogs circled the cars for a few seconds, looking puzzled. They sniffed the ground and came back, then turned their wide heads to stare in various directions. Lenny looked at Earl nervously, but Earl said, “Give them as long as it takes.”

The dogs finally agreed that the visitor center building was the right direction. They trotted to the door and sniffed the steps and nosed the glass. Earl said, “They probably walked over there, but they didn’t come back.”

Earl picked up his backpack, then eased his arms into the straps and walked to the visitor center. “Auf den fersen folgen.” The dogs fell into place at his side. He crossed the road with them and watched their faces. They seemed not to smell the scent, but maybe to dimly suspect it.

Lenny joined him beside the sign that said HIGHLINE TRAIL. He gazed at the dogs. “Doesn’t look like they picked up anything here.”

“No,” said Earl. “The two of them bought new shoes. The first time they wore them was probably when they got out of the car and walked over here.”

“Then why did you get them to sniff the car and the old shoes?” The man’s head might as well be a helmet. His was a mind that never failed to disappoint.

“Because in a day or so, when we need help, the new shoes are going to smell exactly like the old ones.”

Earl stood and stared into the darkness where the trail led off under the trees. His mind formed the words, “I’m coming. You’ll wish you had put a gun in your mouth while you could.” He wasn’t sure precisely whom he was talking to. The distinction didn’t mean enough for him to try to sort it out. He would have all of them in their turns and in the ways that they deserved.

It seemed to Calvin Seaver that he had called Earl and Linda a hundred times—first from Kennedy Airport, then from his stopover in Chicago, then Denver, and finally from Billings. He had never gotten anything but the answering machine, and he could hardly leave a message telling two killers that Pete Hatcher was in Salmon Prairie, Montana.

It was in the Billings airport that he saw the story on the television news, and he was glad that he had been cautious. There was film of a lot of people milling around outside a restaurant in Swan Lake, just a few miles up the road from Salmon Prairie. The newsman, who looked enough like the one Seaver usually watched in Las Vegas to be his brother, said a sniper had fired through the window and killed a man. What caught Seaver’s attention had not been the body bag being wheeled out on a collapsible stretcher. It was the woman with long black hair who was being helped into a police car beside the ambulance.

He checked into a hotel in Billings and watched the report over and over on every local channel. For the first couple of hours he could feel that although his mind was still unsure, his body was already celebrating, pumping blood through the arteries in hard, dizzying surges, his breaths tasting sweet and full.

Seaver had been in the trouble business for over twenty years, and he had developed a clear idea of the odds. Swan Lake was a tiny town in the middle of the mountains. The population of the whole state was just a bit over eight hundred thousand. There probably hadn’t been a shooting in Swan Lake since the Indian Wars. How could it not be Earl who had done it? How could that dark-haired woman not be the dark-haired woman? But Seaver needed to be positive. He sat on the edge of the hotel bed, the remote control in his hand, switching from channel to channel for three hours.

At ten o’clock, when the local news came on again, there was a photograph of the shooting victim. It was a portrait of a man wearing a suit and tie, his expression in a forced smile. It looked a little bit like Pete Hatcher, but it wasn’t. The newswoman was telling Seaver that it was just some guy who had gotten himself shot—some unsuspecting dope who had been eating breakfast in front of the wrong window. Seaver couldn’t believe it.

His mind shuffled quickly through the possibilities, looking for hope. The picture was a fraud. Earl had hit Hatcher, but Hatcher wasn’t dead. The dark-haired woman had slipped the newsmen a fake picture to keep Earl from trying again while Hatcher was in the hospital. Or Earl had shot Hatcher, and Hatcher was dead. The picture was taken off some stolen ID the police had found in his wallet, and that was why it was a picture of somebody else. The more Seaver thought about it, the more he liked that theory. It made a lot of sense, especially if Hatcher had been shot in the head. Most people could barely look in the direction of a fatal head wound without fainting, and even if they did, there was so much blood on the face and so much distortion of the muscles—a slackening at first and then a tightening into a rictus—that any resemblance the corpse bore to a photograph of anything alive would have been accepted as a match.

Seaver clung to this theory for another half hour, waiting impatiently for the newswoman to come back from a commercial and announce that the initial identification had been wrong. His hope ended when the newswoman came back from a commercial with, instead, footage of the victim’s parents leaving the coroner’s office after identifying the body.

He wearily leafed through the pile of tourist magazines the hotel maids had left on the coffee table. They contained very little except ads for stores and restaurants in the area, but finally he found one with three pages of maps in it and spent a few minutes studying them.

Tomorrow morning, after he had caught up on his sleep, he would drive up to Kalispell. It looked like the only town up there that was big enough to hide a stranger comfortably. He would check into a hotel there and spend some time trying to pick up signs of Earl and Linda.

27

Jane led Pete along the trail in the waning light. She kept them at a double-time pace, along the long high cliff the map called the Garden Wall and on to Haystack Butte. When she judged that they had traveled two miles, she slowed to a walk. She waited for her wind to come back and then listened while Hatcher’s deep, labored breathing slowly became quiet. She said, “How do you feel?”

“Lousy.”

“Does your head ache?”

“Yes.”

“Dizzy?”

“Yes.”

“Green spots on your hands?”