the door and frame, and lifted the latch. She lifted the door to set the wheel back onto its track, put the knife into her pack, and stepped inside.
She explored the interior of the house. The moving crew had taken everything that could be removed. The bare floors and walls made her footsteps echo as she went from room to room. On the ground floor there was a row of bedroom suites with bathrooms between them, and then at the end of the long hallway she came to one room that had a damaged wall.
The plaster had been dug away in two places under the window, as though someone had tried to burrow through the wall. Jane went to the window and looked out, then realized what it was. The holes in the wall were almost exactly in the places where the bars over the window were anchored. Somebody had been trying to remove the bars from the inside. Jane looked more closely and saw scratches on the plaster that looked like knife marks. These weren't part of some remodeling project. There were no drill holes or chiseled spots. Someone had tried to dig out of here with a knife—Christine.
It was obvious that Richard Beale had no intention of setting Christine free. The damaged plaster reminded Jane of the possibility that Christine was already dead. She might even be buried somewhere on this estate. She had been missing from her apartment in Minneapolis for about a month, and the plot of land around this house was huge. A girl like Christine, still weak from giving birth, would have been easy enough to kill, and then she could have been buried deep in one of the flower beds where the soil was soft and moist and free of stones and roots. They could have buried her and then transplanted a few flats of poppies and petunias over her. These were rich people. They could have had a crew plant a full-grown tree, or even cover Christine's body with a new section of driveway.
If Christine was dead, Jane knew, she would probably never find the body. San Diego had the Pacific Ocean to the west, and hundreds of miles of lonely deserts and mountains to the east. But she had seen the movers carrying a crib and boxes of toys. They wouldn't do that unless the baby was alive.
The second time through the house, Jane counted steps and judged angles, looking out windows to determine what could be seen and what couldn't from each of them. She studied the great room without its furniture, trying to detect hiding places. First she checked the inside of the fireplace, but found no guns. Then she checked the guest bathroom just off the big room, and found the second pistol. She unloaded it and taped it where she'd found it. She went into the garage, noticed a rope and a light stepladder, carried them out to two sections of the wall around the property that she had never visited, and hid them. She suspected that she might have to go over the wall again, and she wanted as many ways up and out as possible. Jane turned on the battery-operated baby monitor, climbed the shelves to the top of one of the built-in bookcases in the big room, and placed it there.
She took advantage of the waning daylight to study every part of the place. All the time while she worked, she was listening for the sound of someone else arriving. There was sparse traffic on the road beyond the high hedges. Each time she heard a car approach, she listened for the noise of the front gate opening. But there were only the calls of the birds in the surrounding groves of trees and an occasional flutter of leaves from a sudden warm gust off the desert. Jane unlocked several windows and two service doors on the wings of the house so she would be able to come in and out at will.
When everything was done, Jane went upstairs into the master bedroom, where she could see the grounds through windows on three sides. As she studied the estate, she picked out the places where Steve Demming might set up a sniper's nest to kill her, and calculated the angles from the house to the places where she could find the ladder and rope she'd left near the wall. She saw the hiding places she would have to check for enemies, and the false hiding places where a person would be more vulnerable rather than less: the low hedges near the house that would obscure a person but would make noise and reveal movement.
She waited, looked, and listened while the sun went down and the house gradually sunk into darkness. When it was eleven o'clock, she stood and put on her backpack, then looked out the windows again before she left the master bedroom. She went down the stairs at the center of the building and then walked from room to room in the dark, testing her memory of the distances and spaces. Then she went out to the garage and made her way across the broad brick pavement to the garden planted beside the front gate to hide the machinery that opened it. She sat down behind a tree near the gate.
At eleven-thirty the front gate began to glide to the left on its track. A black Cadillac Escalade drove in and stopped on the brick pavement in front of the garage where it was closest to the front door of the house. It was where Jane had expected the vehicle to park, shielded from the line of fire on three sides—the house, the garage, and the front hedge. Jane watched from her hiding place by the gate as car doors opened, lights went on, and people emerged. The driver was a man whom she had seen in New York. He had to be Demming. He was tall, had light hair, and an athletic body that had thickened a bit in middle age. He wore a short-sleeved polo shirt with a sport coat over it, presumably to hide a gun. He went to the front door, unlocked and opened it, and stood guard there while the second man joined him.
The second man was also tall. His hair was dark, and he had a handsome face, smooth and a bit boyish. He had to be Richard Beale. She could imagine Christine being attracted to him. He stood on the porch just in the doorway while Demming went inside, presumably to make sure Jane wasn't in there waiting. Beale looked increasingly uneasy as he waited for Demming to return. When he did, Beale stepped in.
Jane remained motionless and looked hard, waiting for the next two, who were sitting in the back seat. The left rear door opened and there was the one with black hair she had seen outside Lompoc prison. The woman got out, held the door, and waited for the other woman to get out, then grasped her arm and hurried her into the house.
For the few moments while the second woman was visible, Jane strained to see her clearly. Her height seemed to match Christine's. She looked about thirty pounds heavier than Christine had been when Jane had seen her, and that would be about right. The hair seemed to be the same style as Christine's. Was that exactly what it would look like four months later? The dress was one that Jane and Christine had picked out at the Mall of America in Minnesota. There wasn't enough time. In the few steps between the car and the house Jane couldn't tell if was Christine or it wasn't.
Jane waited until she saw a light go on in the big central room, then stepped to the front gate across the driveway, took out the padlock and chain she had brought, wrapped it around the gate and its post, and locked it shut. Then she kept going to the pedestrian gate nearby and locked that one, too. She moved around the garage toward the back yard, where she could see through the big glass wall into the lighted room.
The four people looked lost in the emptiness of the big room. They drifted around in it, like fish swimming the perimeter of a bare aquarium. Jane could see no weapons on any of them, but she assumed they were armed. She moved into position in the garden a dozen yards from the back of the house, turned on the baby monitor she had kept, and watched the people in the house react. They must have heard the click.
'What's that?'
'Do you hear that, too?'
'It sounds like static.'
'Where's it coming from—the ceiling?'
Jane said, 'It's me. I'm here. We're going to do this quickly. Christine?'
A man's voice jumped in right away to preempt anything the woman would say. 'What do you want us to do?' Jane guessed that they had rehearsed this in advance, trying to make sure that Jane didn't hear the impostor's voice.
'Let Christine walk out the glass door at the back of the house and onto the lawn. The rest of you, stand in the center of the room and keep your hands above your heads.'
She recognized Beale's voice from her telephone call. 'What do we do?'
There was a whisper. 'She can hear.'
The woman who was supposed to be Christine walked to the sliding door.
'Wait.' It was Demming's voice.
The woman didn't stop. She opened the sliding door and stepped into the darkness. She began to walk out into the yard away from the house. She stepped past the rock garden where Jane crouched and onto the lawn.
Jane switched the monitor off and the woman turned around and took a step toward her. 'Stop there.'
The woman moved her head from side to side, and Jane could tell the woman was trying to see her better. Jane crouched in the shadows a few yards from her. The light from the glass wall of the house was behind Jane and
