seconds. That was the way to keep a runner alive: keep her out of sight, and give her an escape route she could use if something went wrong.
Jane stopped herself. She had unconsciously slipped into the assumption that C. Langer was a woman, just because Chris was a woman, maybe because the house looked like a woman’s. But Sid Freeman had told her that most of the clients he’d seen had been men. C. Langer was probably a man. It was also possible that this runner wouldn’t be some stockbroker who had driven drunk, or a banker who had been unable to keep customers’ accounts from merging with his own. There was no guarantee that the face-changers wouldn’t take on a runner who was dangerous. If they were in it for the money, a client was anybody who had the fee.
Jane stayed down the street in her car until it was nearly light. When she saw movement behind the blinds just before six, she pulled away from the curb and drove around the corner. She didn’t want to try for a first look at C. Langer at a moment when she was the only person on the street, and C. Langer could see as well as she could. She drove down to the beach to find a hotel where the dining room opened for breakfast early.
Jane spent two days learning about C. Langer’s car. By a process of elimination she learned it was a red Mazda Miata. It struck Jane as an impossible choice. Sporty little cars attracted attention, even if they weren’t expensive. Convertible tops were easy for a thief to slash open to get the radio, and a runner had to be careful to stay off police blotters. It was possible that C. Langer had a second car hidden somewhere and that this was a decoy, the one he or she wanted watchers to get used to seeing.
Jane was curious enough to try to find it. California law required drivers to carry proof of insurance, and C. Langer would be careful not to break any laws. Jane waited until after the street was dark and empty, then cut a slit in the convertible top that was just big enough to let her reach inside and open the door. She found the insurance card under the visor on the driver’s side, wrote down the company and policy number, and went home.
The next day she called the company and gave the woman who answered the policy number. She said she was a loan officer and C. Langer had used the car as collateral on a loan. Was the insurance on it current and valid? Liability, collision, and so on? Payments made on time? Cost of policy? Were there other vehicles on the policy? There was also a new Ford Escort, and the woman gave her the license number.
It took Jane another day to find the Escort. There were few places in Santa Barbara that would do for a runner’s car. It had to be accessible at any hour, it had to be close to where he or she lived, and it had to be unobtrusive. Jane found it in a carport behind an apartment building two blocks away.
It wasn’t until she had been studying the house and the cars for three days that she saw C. Langer come out the front door, walk down the steps, and get into the Miata. C. Langer was a man in his early thirties. He wore a crisply pressed pair of khaki pants, Top-Sider shoes, and a short-sleeved polo shirt. He had the sort of sunglasses that Jane had always favored for her runners, with big photosensitive lenses that kept a bit of tint in dim light and became practically opaque in the sun. He looked lean and walked with more energy than he needed to expend, and his skin showed that he spent quite a bit of time in the sun. Even in the short walk to the car he was watchful. His head was high and his eyes were in motion, scanning the middle distance from left to right as though he had been taught to take in the sights one sector at a time to avoid missing anything. Jane stepped on the accelerator of her car so she would be beyond the corner before he could get around to looking at her.
She drove to the supermarket and bought a cookie sheet, then bought a pair of tin snips at a hardware store nearby, and went to a big drugstore on State Street for a box of thin, disposable latex gloves, a small flashlight, and a roll of adhesive tape. She cut a thin strip from the middle of the cookie sheet, wrapped one end of it with adhesive tape to make a handle, and she was ready.
Jane had predicted that the bathroom window and the kitchen windows would be the least troublesome, and she had been right. The bathroom window had no screen, so she could simply insert the thin strip of metal upward between the wooden frames of the two panes of glass. When it was in, she pushed forward to bend it slightly so it slipped behind the latch. She had made it long enough so she was able to use it as a lever to pry the latch around and unlock the window.
The architect had probably assured somebody that the window was too narrow for a man, but it was wide enough for Jane to slither halfway in. It wasn’t until she reached her hips that she had to turn onto her side, put her right hand on the sink, and pull her legs in.
She closed the window behind her before she went out into the living room. She paused at the doorway. This wasn’t the way runners’ abodes usually looked. They almost always took furnished lodgings first, and kept them until they grew more confident. Even then, they tended to own things that they wouldn’t mind walking away from.
C. Langer had an antique sideboard. He had a dining room table inlaid with squares of bird’s-eye maple. He had a television set with a screen so big that it had gone beyond being obtrusive to just being a black wall. And C. Langer had a grand piano covered with framed photographs.
She moved closer. There was a picture of a man who looked as though he might be related to C. Langer standing on the deck of a sailboat. There was another of two children on a ski slope with a blond woman who looked like a model. The pictures were impressive. They looked old. She wondered whether Sid had made this man a few relatives. Of course, there were no pictures of C. Langer himself. A runner had to be able to walk away without leaving a fresh portrait of himself in the middle of the living room.
She moved into the kitchen and opened the cupboards. C. Langer’s kitchen didn’t look as though he did much cooking, so she began with the one beside the stove where the pots and pans were. It took her only a moment to find the pistol. She pulled it out of the pot gingerly because she could tell by the weight that it had a loaded magazine. She held it up. It was a Glock 19 nine millimeter. She put it back and looked in the refrigerator.
There was a milk carton that was too far back, and didn’t slosh when she lifted it. Inside were a driver’s license and credit cards in the name Frederick Henry Waldman, and underneath them were about fifty hundred- dollar bills in a plastic bag. The Waldman cards had no scratches from being swiped through magnetic readers, so they had to be a second set of forgeries he kept in case somebody saw through C. Langer. The milk carton was his escape kit.
Jane moved into the bedroom. Maybe the face-changers had taught him so well that Jane would not find what she was looking for. Maybe they had searched his belongings, cut the tags out of his clothes, removed anything that related to his old life, packed the boxes in Chicago themselves, and sent them on only when they were sure they were clean. But she had met few runners who had willingly taken that last step. Usually they tried to keep something—an old driver’s license, a birth certificate, some piece of paper—that would let them go back if some miracle happened and home suddenly became a safe place.
Jane took the top drawer out of the nightstand, held it up, and looked to see if anything was taped under it. As she moved to put it back, she saw the second pistol in the bottom drawer. This one was a Walther P99. She slid the drawer in over it. This was a man who didn’t waste money on cheap, unreliable firearms. She slid the drawer out and felt under it and behind it, but there was nothing taped there either.
Jane moved to the dresser and began removing the drawers, beginning at the top. It wasn’t until she tried the bottom drawer that she found the wooden box. She opened it and looked at each item carefully. There were two watches—a Patek Philippe and a Cartier, but neither had anything engraved on it. There were a couple of tie tacks and some cuff links. Then she picked up the ring, almost unbelieving. It was a Yale class ring that said 1965 on it. C. Langer wasn’t nearly old enough to have graduated in 1965. Was his father young enough to have? Just barely, if he had married young.
She tried to see it as a prop. Maybe he had bought it in a pawnshop to help with C. Langer’s identity. But if he’d done that, he must have expected to alter the year somehow. She looked at the side and made out the initials B.R.V. He would have to do something about those, too. But there was something bigger than that wrong with the idea. If a runner wanted to hide and develop a safe identity, pretending to be a Yale alumnus was a rotten idea, and wearing a Yale ring was a worse idea. If a college was necessary, it should be something like the University of California, which had nine campuses, each as big as Yale, and must be so familiar to people around here that nobody would think about it. Apparently the face-changers hadn’t bothered to teach this runner the first rule: don’t answer any questions until somebody asks.
Jane looked around the room to be sure that she was leaving it undisturbed, then picked up the pistol in the nightstand and went to the living room to wait.
Just as she sat down she heard the Miata drive up and stop in front of the house. She heard the car door slam, and suddenly the sights she had seen began to come together into a suspicion. The Yale ring, the money he
