it?'
Jane shrugged. 'I don't know. She could be somewhere else, perfectly safe.'
'But you don't want me to be here while you find out.'
'No. I don't.'
They stopped speaking and began the work of getting the house ready for an extended period with Sharon away. Jane went into the kitchen and began taking perishable food out of the refrigerator and putting it into a plastic garbage bag. It took Sharon only a few minutes to pack the things she needed and place her suitcase by the front door. By then Jane had taken the garbage out to her SUV and was going from room to room making sure all of the windows were locked.
Jane said, 'I see some of the lights are on timers. Is there anything else we need to do here? No pets?'
'No. I just have to cancel the newspaper and fill out a card to put a hold on the mail before we leave.'
'All right. I'll see if I can get you a plane reservation.'
The mood had turned somber. Jane used her cell phone to get the flight to Seattle while Sharon called the
'Is there anyone you know of who might be putting Christine up?'
'No. She had friends here, but Richard would have known about all of them, and she knew—at least after I told her—that even calling them might put them in danger. If there is anybody like that it would have to be somebody outside San Diego, and it would have to be somebody that none of us knew about.'
'Like me.'
'Like you,' said Sharon. She paused, then said, 'I'd better take one last look around.' Sharon went into her room and Jane could hear her for a few minutes, opening and closing drawers, moving hangers in the closet. After a time she came out to find Jane looking in the telephone book. 'What are you looking for?'
'The Beale Company,' Jane said. 'I found it. I didn't find Richard Beale's address, though, and I didn't bring it with me.'
'I have it.' She went to her kitchen counter and opened a small address book. After she copied an address, she handed it to Jane.
'Thank you.' She looked at it for a moment, then said, 'This was where Christine lived with him, right?'
'Yes. But I never went over there. When we talked during that time it was usually on the phone, or we'd meet at a restaurant. I thought it was sort of my responsibility as her old teacher not to act as though her situation was okay with me, or to get chummy with him.'
'But he knew where you lived, right?'
'I'm sure he probably did.' She smiled. 'But I'm leaving, so it doesn't matter.'
'Before you go, I'd like to borrow a spare key.'
'Sure, but why?'
'If someone comes here to find you, I don't want their trip to be wasted.'
27
Jane stood outside the wall of windows in front of the San Diego airport with the people smoking a last cigarette before their flights. She wore a wide sun hat and big sunglasses and held a lighted cigarette in her hand. Now and then she took some smoke into her mouth and blew it out. She watched Sharon until she was beyond the security barrier and walking down the concourse to board her plane. Then Jane turned her attention to the ticketing area long enough to be sure that none of the four people she had seen chasing Christine showed up at the last minute to board Sharon's flight. A minute after flight time, Jane threw away her cigarette and went inside to look at the television monitor to verify that Sharon's plane had taken off. Then she went to the parking lot and drove back to Sharon's house.
She was almost positive now that her intuition about how Christine had been abducted from Minneapolis was correct. The four people Richard Beale had hired had stalked her there. Probably they had put her in an enclosed vehicle of some kind—Jane imagined a windowless van—and driven across half the country to bring Christine to Richard Beale. But that must have been three weeks ago, and finding Christine—and maybe the baby, too, by now —was not going to be simple. The next step for Jane was to find out where Beale was now.
In the late afternoon Jane drove to the offices of the Beale Company in La Jolla and studied the building from the street. It was a four-story rectangle with windows that had been tinted to an almost opaque black, so the building looked like a shiny black box. The place held a special attraction for Jane. If Beale had anything he wanted to keep secret, she was more likely to be able to find a way to get at it in his office than at his house. She was particularly interested in a list of the pieces of property that the company owned. If Beale was holding Christine, it would have to be in a place he could control absolutely.
Most businesses had some sort of video surveillance system. There would also be at least a halfhearted security service at night, an armed patrol that drove by looking for broken windows and unexpected lights. But most office buildings were cleaned at night by some kind of janitorial service, so it would be important that Jane be ready before then.
A little before six, Jane drove her SUV north to the area near Sharon's house in Encinitas. Earlier she had seen some stores that she knew would have the items she needed, and would be open in the evening. She began at a giant Sears store. She went to the men's clothing section and picked up a pair of navy blue pants and a matching shirt, a baseball cap that was only a half-shade darker blue than the clothes, and a dark blue bandanna. Then she went to the hardware section. There among the power tools she found packages of disposable dust masks that fit over a person's nose and mouth to keep dust from entering the lungs, and in the paint department a package of very thin rubber gloves.
She waited at Sharon's house until it was night, changed into her Sears clothes, and then drove back to La Jolla. She parked down the street from the Beale Company building and settled in to watch. At one A.M. she saw a white van pull into the parking lot beside the building. It was old, with some dents in the rear bumper, the sort that came from backing into posts in parking lots. The blue logo on the side of the van was a big outline of a hand, and the words said HELPING HAND JANITORIAL. Two young Hispanic men climbed down from the van, went around to the back, and opened the doors. They pulled two boards out of the back and leaned them on the bumper to make a ramp, then steered a big industrial vacuum cleaner down, then a big floor buffer, and locked the van.
She watched them go to the front door, unlock it, and go inside. Now that it was dark out, she could look through the dark glass and see the janitors working in lighted offices. When they went into a room they would turn on the light, and that single square on the side of the black building would become transparent. First one of the men went from room to room emptying wastebaskets into a large plastic trash can on wheels. After he had done that he would take a rag and a bottle of glass cleaner to the desks and the windows. Coming along behind him, the second man ran the vacuum cleaner on the carpets and turned off the light. The two worked quickly, and Jane could follow their progress easily from outside.
When the first man went outside to wheel the trash can to the Dumpster, he stuck a doorstop in the front door to keep it ajar so he could get back in. While he was out of sight, Jane got out of her SUV wearing her work uniform, baseball cap, and dust mask. She went to the front door and slipped inside. Surveillance cameras were almost always mounted high, so she kept her head low as she hurried down the hall.
The two janitors had finished with the now-darkened interiors of the offices, so she hurried to one on the first floor, went inside, and crawled under the desk to wait. She heard the elevator doors open and close a couple of times in the quiet building as the men moved from one floor to another. Some time later she heard them return with the electric buffer and polish the lobby.
When Jane heard the sounds of the men moving their equipment outside, she waited a few more minutes, then got up and cautiously walked down the hall. Their van was gone, and she was alone in the dimly lit building. She could explore freely. After looking at the signs on a few doors, she found one off the main lobby that said, RICHARD BEALE, PRESIDENT. She looked the other way and saw the glass wall of the atrium, and in front of it, the receptionist's desk where she had seen Christine in the photographs on the Internet.
She opened the door to Beale's office and stopped. There were no windows. The office was the right size—a bit bigger than the others—and it had the right sort of furniture: large leather couches, a long polished conference table, and a big glass-topped desk with very little on it except a computer screen and a keyboard and a telephone.
