down a martini before we got to the table and half a bottle of wine with dinner. That wasn’t a problem for him, but I was tipsy. I was also beginning to feel desperate and weepy, because even though I’d had more to drink than I was used to, everything was clear. I liked him a lot, and I’d had a great chance alone with him, and blown it completely. I tried to prolong the dinner to start all over again and pull it out. All I could think of was after-dinner brandy. Things just got worse. I was dumb and tongue-tied, and by then he was tired of thinking of bright, cheerful things to say. He took me back to the office, where my car was parked, waited until I was inside with the doors locked and the engine running, and left.”
Jane felt sorry for her, partly because she wasn’t blaming it on somebody else, and partly because she had been foolish as the manipulators and opportunists never were. “What did you do?”
“I cried. Then I opened the windows wide and started to drive. I missed my turn for the 295 parkway. I made a U-turn and came back looking for the sign for the entrance, didn’t see the light change, and crashed into another car.” She was wide-eyed, then jumped when she said it, as though she were feeling the shock again in her body. “It was so loud. On TV there’s a kind of crunch sound, but it’s really a bang. After that there was glass breaking and tires squealing sideways on the pavement. It was awful. I was hurt and bleeding and drunk. I was outside of the car, but I didn’t remember standing up and opening the door and all that. The windshield of the other car was gone and the man was lying on the street. He wasn’t dead, but he looked horrible. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. I ran to a phone booth and dialed 911. When they answered I didn’t know the name of the cross street. I had to run a block back down there and look. But when I got there, the police car was there already. Suddenly I’m blowing into a tube, then I’m in handcuffs, and then I’m in jail.”
“What then?”
“He died. The man died.” She looked at Jane anxiously for a reaction. “I was charged with manslaughter. I had been drunk. There was some suspicion that I could have saved him if I’d done the right things, or maybe the prosecutor was just implying that. At my trial my boss had to testify. He never looked at me, or said a word to me. I lost my job, of course.”
“Was it manslaughter?”
“No. The jury said I was criminal, but not that criminal—the D.A. had overcharged me. So I served ninety days in jail for the drunk driving. When I got out I got sued.”
“His family?”
“Among others. He had an ex-wife, and she had been getting alimony. He was thirty-six, and that meant that I owed her twenty-nine years at thirty thousand a year. He had a live-in girlfriend who sued his estate for half. Then the estate sued me to get it back. He had no insurance, so the doctors, the hospital, and the ambulance service sued me. The funeral home hadn’t been paid because ex-wives and girlfriends aren’t legally responsible, so they sued me too.”
Jane was very careful to sound bright and sympathetic. “So you decided to disappear?”
The woman looked at her in surprise. “I wasn’t innocent. If I made it sound that way, it’s a mistake. I killed him. I did it. I wasn’t going to hide from it.”
“Then what are you hiding from?”
“They were going to kill me.” She looked at her lap. “I actually considered letting them.”
“Who was? Who was going to kill you?”
“His friends. They were calling all the time, following me, watching me for a chance. They said that money wasn’t enough; that I was going to die, they were going to do horrible things to me. I told the police, and they came over and took notes. I don’t know what happened to the notes. I could tell they didn’t believe me. They seemed to think I was trying to make it look like the people who had sued me were criminals so I wouldn’t have to pay them.”
“Did you recognize the voices?”
“No.”
“Did the ones following you look like anyone you had seen before—in court, for instance?”
“I never saw them. Afterward they would tell me on the phone where I’d been, what I was wearing.”
“Did you pay the judgments against you?”
“Well, no. I was going to, and I still want to. But when I found out I had to run away, that was the first thing they told me. It was going to be expensive, and I would have to pay in cash.”
“Who told you?”
“Your people. They said that when you run, cash is safer. They needed to be paid, of course, and there was a lot of overhead. They told me not to use the credit cards they gave me to run up bills because I couldn’t pay right away without getting traced, and that would make it much harder to go back later.”
Jane pondered the woman’s story and felt another wave of pity for her. She was smart, but she seemed to use the little she knew to help people delude her. She wanted to go back, so she was willing to believe that avoiding fraudulent credit would keep her clean enough to surface later. She didn’t seem to know that running was a crime, too.
Jane supposed that she couldn’t expect this woman to have figured out that people who wanted to kill her probably wouldn’t want to talk to her on the phone first. The ones who did call probably weren’t friends of the deceased. They might very well be people who wanted to give her a convincing reason to disappear. She had not even questioned it.
Jane weighed the next question with care, then decided it was safe. “How did you happen to hear about us?” Even if everybody heard from the same screener, this woman wouldn’t know it.
“From the police.”
“What police?” Jane tried to keep the impatience out of her voice, but her mind was already making connections.
“Sergeant Gilbert, from the Witness Protection Squad. He asked me what was being done for me, and promised to look into it. A couple of days later he was back. He said the other police didn’t believe me, but he did. By then I was crying and begging him to help me, but he couldn’t. I wasn’t a witness in an investigation, because nobody was investigating the threats. Finally, he told me where to go.”
“What did he tell you?”
“To call a number and ask for Jane.”
26
“Jane.” That was what the woman had said. Jane’s mouth was dry and her stomach felt as though at its bottom there was a layer of loose stones. She kept her expression empty, but her mind was rushing around picking up small bits of information she had stored and rearranging them in new patterns.
Jane felt a surge of annoyance at this poor, stupid woman. She had been sent to people she knew would give her false identification papers, but it had never occurred to her to wonder whether the person who sent her might not have a false ID of his own. She had never thought of calling the police department to find out whether there was such as thing as a Witness Protection Squad.
The face-changers had developed a routine, or at least a method they had used more than once. They had a man who was spectacularly good at impersonating a plainclothes police officer, but who was definitely not one: how could he be a cop in both Chicago and Washington? Both times all he had needed to do was appear at the right time, after the real police had come and gone. That made the victims forget that they hadn’t exactly called him. He had probably read about this one in the newspaper.
Jane tried out the theory that the name Jane was a coincidence. It didn’t sound convincing. She had spent thirteen years taking fugitives out of the world, and by now there must be a couple of hundred new people all over the country who had come into being because she had invented them. People—even vulnerable, scared people who knew better—sometimes said more than they should. And the person they told would be even less likely to keep the secret. Jane had been a guide for only about two years when the first total stranger had shown up at her door with a story of how he had heard of her that didn’t include the name of anyone she had ever met.
Getting to be too well known was just one of a dozen occupational hazards that quietly, invisibly grew to
