A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(2)

Chelsea ran out of the hallway yelling, “Nick! What the heck are you—” before she saw his body and the window pane behind him. She cut off her mother’s phone call, dropped to her belly, and dialed 911.





2



Jane McKinnon jogged along the shoulder of the road toward home. Every morning after her husband, Carey, went off to the hospital to prep for surgery at six, she did tai chi and then went out to run. Sometimes she drove from the big old stone house in Amherst to the Niagara River near the house where she’d grown up, and then ran the three miles along the river to the South Grand Island Bridge and back. That was the run she had always made as a teenager—three miles each way with the wide blue-gray river beside her flowing steadily northward toward the Falls. Sometimes she would drive over the bridge to Grand Island and run along West River Road, looking across the west branch of the river at Navy Island and Canada. Sometimes she ran on one of the college campuses, or in Delaware Park in Buffalo.

Today she ran along the roads near the house she shared with her husband. The house had been here for a long time, the original structure a building made of fieldstones mortared over logs a foot and a half thick around 1760. Carey’s ancestors had done some farming and some trading with her Seneca ancestors who made up most of the population at the time. For the past few generations the McKinnons had been doctors.

When she was a child there had still been thousands of acres of farmland along here, mostly lying fallow and waiting for the developers. Now the developers had been at work for many years, and she ran past deep green golf courses and huge, low houses set far back from the highway and surrounded by enough remnants of old forests to provide shaded yards in the summer and windbreaks against the storms that blew off the Great Lakes in the winter.

Jane seldom ran the same route two days in a row. She never permitted a pattern to develop or ran in a predictable place on a predictable day. Random changes were one of the habits she had nurtured since she was in college. Before she had been Jane McKinnon she had been Jane Whitefield. Now, like other suburban housewives, she bought groceries at supermarkets, but unlike them, she had a list of fourteen markets, and she shopped in them randomly, often at odd hours.

Life was usually quiet for Jane McKinnon, much of it taken up by various kinds of volunteer work—benefits and fund-raising for the hospital, teaching two classes a week in the Seneca language for junior high and high school children at the Tonawanda Reservation during the winter, and helping to elect political candidates in the fall. Jane avoided being chairwoman of any public events, never had her name on stationery, and never identified herself on phone calls for causes except as “Jane.”

Jane still kept bug out kits in the McKinnon house in Amherst and in the house where she had grown up. Each one consisted of a packet with ten thousand dollars in cash and a collection of valid identification cards, credit cards, and licenses. The pictures on the cards were hers and -Carey’s, but the names were not. Over the years she had learned to grow identities, using a set of forged papers to obtain real ones, buying things with the credit cards and paying the bills so other companies would offer more credit. As soon as she had a few valid forms of identification for herself and Carey under new names, she had obtained passports in those names. Each kit also included a 9 mm pistol and two extra loaded magazines.

Jane had persuaded Carey to accept her precautions as a part of their lives. He was tall, strong, and athletic, and had no enemies of his own, so it had taken a few new experiences for him to understand that he needed to take the steps she asked of him. The most powerful had happened only a year ago. Jane had gone to Los Angeles and sneaked an innocent man serving a murder sentence out of a courthouse. Jane’s runner had driven off as she’d planned, but she had been captured by his enemies, shot, beaten, and tortured for several days before she had escaped. Now Carey drove to work at the hospital on one of five different routes she had plotted for him, each with a cutoff where he could circle back and come out in the opposite direction if he was followed. But more important, she had taught him to look. He was aware of the people, the cars, the changes around him, and that was the one precaution that mattered most.

As Jane ran, she could still feel the effects of the damage the bullet had done to her right thigh a year ago, and she listened to the rhythm of her steps to be sure she was not favoring that side or developing a limp. She also kept her eyes moving all the time. She watched cars coming and going, studied each person she could see in a window, noted anything that looked different in any yard. Today almost everything was exactly as it had been last time she had passed. The few things that were different she memorized for the next time.

She was coming up the final stretch of road before the old stone house, building up speed because she was coming to the end, when she saw two unfamiliar cars parked in front of it.

Jane reduced her speed while she studied the cars. They were both relatively new full-size cars. The front one was a Lincoln, and the second something like it, perhaps a Cadillac. They were both plain even under scrutiny, without any of the aftermarket equipment like floodlights or antennas that plain-wrap police vehicles usually had.

She maintained her speed, ran on toward her house, and saw that both cars had people in them. There were two women in the front and two in the back of each car—eight in all. The ones she could see were elderly and a bit overweight. She didn’t want to stare any harder. They were probably in the neighborhood for some charity meeting or other. One woman looked a bit like Ellen Dickerson.