A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(102)

As the two men walked away from the house, the tall blond one turned toward his companion. “You drive. I’ll make the call.”

They got into their rental car and the shorter, darker man drove away from the house. The blond one dialed and waited, and then said, “Hello. This is Al Galbano, calling for Mr. Salamone.”

He waited for a few seconds, watching his companion maneuver into the traffic heading for Denver.

“This is Salamone.”

“Mr. Salamone, I’m calling you from Denver. Ron Pozzo and I found the cousin’s house, but Chelsea never came to Denver. We talked to her mother, and got another address for her.”

“You think this is the right one?”

“Yes, I do. Pozzo and I do this routine where we’re special agents in the DEA. We use it to confiscate drugs and money. We usually let the drug dealer go, and charge him a fee for protection. We’ve got ID and badges, and we’ve convinced everybody so far.”

Salamone laughed. “You pulled that on the girl’s mother?”

“Yes. We said we were involved in her case because of the drugs. We said the guy who raped her daughter would walk away with a small fine for possession of the drug if she didn’t get the girl to cooperate with us and prove he used it on her.”

“Brilliant. Absolute genius. Can you give me the address?”

McNally took out the small notebook, read the address to Salamone, and then tore the sheet out of the notebook, crumpled it, and let it fly out the window. There was no sense in leaving an address like that in his notebook. Pretty soon it would be a dangerous thing to have.





26



Jane drove the Volkswagen Passat up New Hampshire Route 120 to the town of Lebanon, continued to Han-over, and turned on Wheelock Street to North Chambers Street. She drifted past the apartment at 1364, looking at the doors and in the windows. She couldn’t see Jimmy, Mattie, or Chelsea, but there seemed to be no damage to glass, locks, or latches, and no signs of anyone watching the house.

She had driven for several hours, and she had been extremely careful. She had brought two people here in separate trips over a period of a few weeks and sent a third by plane. There had never been any sign of a problem, but three was a lot of trips. All the way here she watched to be sure that no other car stayed in her rearview mirror for long enough to be following her. When she left her hotel in Niagara Falls she had looked under the car with a makeup mirror to be sure nothing had been stuck to the undercarriage or in the engine compartment, and checked again after she’d made a stop in Albany. On the way she had taken exits from the thruway four times to see who came off the ramp after her, and then gotten back on. Nobody had followed.

Now Jane drove along the streets in the vicinity of the apartment. She studied the cars parked within sight of the apartment building, looking for heads inside. She searched for any van that could hold a surveillance team, and for any SUV that reminded her of the ones that had pursued her in Ohio and on the reservation, or the one that had brought the cooler to the storage facility outside Akron. She saw high school students and their parents who had come during summer to look at Dartmouth, a number of earnest-looking graduate students, and another group, mostly young men, wearing shorts, backpacks, and hiking boots, many of them carrying hiking staffs. There was an entrance to the Appalachian Trail between a store and a restaurant on Main Street, and Hanover was a good place to stop and get a good meal on the long walk from Maine to Georgia.

When Jane was satisfied, she parked on a street parallel to Chambers so she could come out the back door of the apartment and get to her car if she needed to. As she walked to the apartment she never stopped watching for any sign that she might have missed while she was in the car.

When she reached the apartment building she looked even more carefully to see if any window held a human silhouette or the glint of a lens. She saw nothing. She rang the bell and Mattie opened the door. Mattie took Jane’s hand, pulled her inside, and hugged her for a moment. “It’s so good to see you,” she said.

Jane looked over Mattie’s shoulder. Jimmy and Chelsea came out of another room together, and Jimmy was carrying the remote control from the television set. “Jane,” he said. When the two stopped a few feet away, Jane noticed their shoulders were touching, and that they stayed that way.

Jane released Mattie. “Hi, everybody.” She slung her backpack off her shoulder and set it by the couch, then sat down. “I made the trip again because I’ve done all I can back there for the moment. It’s safer for all of us if I’m here.”

“What does that mean?” Mattie asked.

“I’ve learned some things about our troubles. I’ve managed to get what I’ve found out into the hands of a state police sergeant who’s been searching for Jimmy all this time. He’s been in the hospital but he’s sane and honest, so he’ll get the information to the people who are now running the investigation of the murder.”

“The state trooper we saw in the woods?” asked Jimmy. “The runner?”

“Yes. I did him a favor, so he owed me.”

“He let you tell him all this stuff and walk away without having you followed or anything?” said Jimmy.

“I didn’t say it was a small favor.”

Chelsea said, “So where are we now?”

“I’ve set the dogs after the people who are responsible for this mess. Now we stay out of sight for a while and give the dogs time to work.”