tears—to keep her eyes from closing because that would squeeze them out. But then, after a few minutes, the cutting was over. She still had to endure the hair dye and the wave, but those things had no meaning for her now, because the long black hair was not hers anymore.
Two hours later, she was staring at a woman in the mirror, reminding herself that this woman was the one she had chosen to be. She had short brown hair with a slight curl. The stylist had treated her eyebrows to match the hair, and they made the blue eyes she had inherited from her mother look bigger, but somehow less startling than they had been this morning. She looked like a mildly attractive thirty-year-old who was probably married, probably worked in some kind of office, but lived in the suburbs.
Jane quickly turned away from the mirror. She kept her body turned toward the front of the shop to give the stylist a huge tip while she detested her for her skill, then turned with feigned cheerfulness to go out the back door without looking in the mirrors again. She drove her new Ford Explorer to a big mall, and spent the late afternoon shopping.
In a department store, Jane bought a pair of plain gray soft-sided suitcases that matched the interior of the Explorer, then a supply of makeup, beginning with a foundation that was a shade or two lighter than her skin. Next she selected clothes. When she had been seen in the airport she had been wearing a skirt and jacket she had bought in Beverly Hills and a silk blouse, so she worked to get away from that image. She bought clothes that a married suburban woman might wear while she was doing errands: lots of slacks, comfortable shoes, and oversized tops. She also bought jeans and running shoes, a baseball cap, a pair of designer sunglasses, and a couple of light summer jackets.
She ate dinner in a restaurant in the mall, then drove up the street to a big hardware chain, found her way to the automotive section, and bought big floor mats to match the carpet in the Explorer. She used them to cover her suitcases, and drove to the street behind her hotel and parked.
Before she had left the hotel this morning, she had put up the DO NOT DISTURB sign. On her way out, she had counted the number of doors from the room to the elevator, and established that hers was the fourth from the left end of the building on the third floor. She could see that the curtains were still open, and the dim lamp by the bed was still turned on. The only thing left to check was the car she had rented in Minnesota.
She walked along the street behind the hotel until she found a tall office building with a parking garage beside it. She used the stairs to climb to the fourth floor of the building, then went out the exit door to the upper level of the parking garage, stepped to the edge, and looked down.
The parking lot of the big hotel was filling up for the evening. Most of the curtains on the upper floors of the hotel were closed, but there were lights behind many of them, and some of the small, translucent windows of the bathrooms were lighted. People were beginning the ritual of getting showered and changed for dinner.
Jane studied the people she saw entering and leaving the hotel by the parking lot entrance. It was a weeknight in a city that wasn’t particularly renowned as a tourist attraction, so Jane wasn’t surprised that most of the guests looked as though they were returning from business meetings. Men and women were dressed in suits, and they carried things—briefcases, folders, squarish cases that probably contained computers or samples. A van pulled up and a mixed group of six got out. They were all wearing jeans or casual khaki trousers, but they all had little orange buttons pinned to their chests, and they didn’t divide into male-female pairs when they walked toward the entrance, so this too was business of some kind.
It took Jane another minute to identify the watchers. There were two men in a car at the end of the lot, and two more on the street beyond the parking lot, but she wasn’t sure that what they were watching was her car. She waited to see one of them move, but they waited too.
She walked back into the office building and tried to assess what she had seen. She had run from Minneapolis to Rochester in a stolen car. It would not have been difficult for the ones in Minneapolis to learn that a stolen car had been found in the lot of the Rochester airport, or even to find it themselves. She had hoped that when they did, they would assume she had gone there to board an airplane.
If they knew she had not taken a flight out of Rochester, then they would guess that probably what she had done was rent a car. If a man came to the rental counter—maybe a man pretending to be a cop, and maybe just a man who had a plausible reason and a roll of money—he might have been able to find out what kind of car a particular woman had rented a few hours before. That was simple. But Rochester, Minnesota, was a distance from Milwaukee. Could they have seen her at the airport and followed her all this way? It didn’t seem possible. Even if she had been spectacularly unobservant and not seen them, she had given them plenty of chances to grab her on lonely roads. Somebody in Milwaukee had probably been told to look for a green Pontiac with Minnesota plates, and found it here in the hotel parking lot.
The fact that they were not waiting for her in her room didn’t prove anything. If what they wanted was to capture her, they would not want her in a busy hotel. She descended to the lobby of the office building, found a telephone booth, and studied the phone book. A minute later, she was talking to the local office of Victory Car Rentals.
“I’ve got a problem. I rented a car from your agency at the Rochester, Minnesota, airport, and drove it to Milwaukee. Now it won’t start.”
“What’s it doing?” the man asked.
“What’s it doing?” she repeated. “Nothing.”
“I mean, when you turn the key, does the starter turn over, or does it just sit there?”
“It goes ‘Errr, errr, errr,’ then nothing happens.”
“It’s probably flooded. Turn everything off. Just let it sit for fifteen minutes and try again. It should be fine.”
“I tried that.”
“Oh,” said the man. “Well, then this time, push the pedal all the way down and hold it there while you turn the key.”
Jane sighed loudly. “I’ve done all of those things. I’m running late. I’ve already called a cab to take me to the airport, and I’ve got to go or I’ll miss my plane. I’ve got a client waiting to pick me up at the other end. The car is at the Columbia Hotel on Highland. I’m going to leave the keys at the desk for you.”
The man’s voice sounded forlorn. “There’s probably nothing wrong with the car, ma’am,” he said. “Maybe you’re jumping the gun.”
“Since you work in Milwaukee and the car is from Minnesota, you have no way of knowing, do you? If you want the car, it’s at the Columbia Hotel. My cab just pulled up outside, and I’ve got to go.”
Jane hung up, walked out of the building, and circled two blocks to approach the hotel front entrance from the other direction. She waited up the street until the right moment came. A cab pulled up and let a man out. Jane timed her arrival at the entrance to coincide with the cab’s departure, and fell into step with the man. “Beautiful evening, isn’t it?” she said.
The man, a tall, gangling guy with big feet, a suitcase in one hand, and a useless raincoat draped over his other arm, was startled. He turned toward her quickly, then recovered. “Sure is,” he said.
They reached the door at the same time, and while he was trying to move the suitcase to the other hand, she pulled the door open for him. They walked to the desk together. Jane used the time to search the lobby for watchers, but saw no candidates. The desk clerk looked at both of them attentively and held his hands poised over his computer.
Jane spoke before the man did. “I’m checking out. My name is Stevens. I have two bags in my room ready to go. Can you send somebody up for them?” She held out her key card.
The clerk summoned a bellman, then sent him off with the card while he computed Jane’s bill. She handed him her Lisa Stevens credit card and signed, then said, “I’d like to leave these keys with you. A man from Victory Rentals will be here to pick up my car.”
“Certainly,” said the man. He accepted the keys, slipped a piece of paper onto the ring, and wrote something on it before he put them into a drawer. “Anything else we can do for you?”
“Can you please check to see if anyone has come to the desk to leave a message for me?”
He looked through a small pile of notes. “Nobody’s been here, ma’am.”
“That changes my plan a little,” said Jane. “Can you hold my bags down here for a while? I’ll be back for them later.”
“We’d be happy to,” he said. She could tell he was beginning to dread her next request.
“Thanks,” she said, then hurried out the front door. She took a different route back to her spot on the parking
