A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(73)

Jane knew that on this dark road she would see the glow of headlights in the intersection ahead if a car were coming to the other road, and she saw nothing, so she went into the turn without hitting her brakes. She accelerated out of the turn to keep control, and pushed Mattie’s Camry to higher speeds as she hurtled along in the dark. She had walked every one of these roads in childhood summers, so she drove them tonight by memory and feel and moonlight.

She knew the drivers of the two SUVs would have to wait for the six men in the house to pile into the vehicles before they attempted to pursue her. The lookout car’s headlights were beginning to light up the intersection far behind her now, so she spun into the next right turn blind, then took the next left and turned her lights on. At last she had a chance to look at the dashboard, which had lit up too. Mattie’s Camry had over a half tank of gas. Jane sent a silent thank-you to her. That would be enough.

At ninety miles an hour, Jane reached the Pembroke entrance to the New York State Thruway in a few minutes. She slowed, drove onto the westbound side, and stopped at the Pembroke rest stop. She coasted into the parking lot and parked between a tall pickup truck and a camper, got out, hurried to the back of the car, and went down on her side. She reached up under Mattie’s car, pulled the small black box off the gas tank, and examined it. The black plastic part of the box said FASTTRACK TRANSPONDER in raised letters. Jane walked briskly toward the building, scanning the lot.

She selected a tour bus with Ontario plates at the side of the rest stop building, reloading a line of tourists, most of them elderly and all of them speaking German. She went to the left side of the bus away from the doors and stared into the bus’s left side mirror. The driver wasn’t in his seat.

It took less than a second to squat, attach the little black transponder to a clean spot under the bus’s chassis so its magnet held it there, stand, and keep walking. She stepped into the building and stopped in the ladies’ room. When she came outside, the bus had already moved down the entrance ramp. She could see it far ahead, diminishing into the distance, probably toward a hotel so the tourists could go to sleep and get up early to visit Niagara Falls.

Jane returned to Mattie’s Camry, pulled out onto the thruway and took the exit at Depew, went on the cloverleaf over the thruway to the eastbound side, and drove toward Rochester. She took exit 46, I-390 to Rochester. All the time while she was driving she watched to be sure she had not been followed. She got off I-390 at the Greater Rochester International Airport, parked Mattie’s Camry in the long-term lot, walked to the terminal, and took a cab to the Hyatt Hotel on Main Street in Rochester.

At the hotel Jane went to her room, retrieved her small suitcase, wiped everything for prints, and stopped at the front desk to check out. Then she walked across the lobby to the elevator, took it to the first level of the underground garage, and found the Volkswagen Passat with Mattie sitting behind the wheel looking uncomfortable. When Mattie saw Jane walking toward her she smiled, opened the door, and got out. “You’d better drive. I don’t even know where we’re going.”

“Happy to,” Jane said. She reached inside, popped the trunk open, put her suitcase inside, and then closed the trunk and sat behind the wheel. She backed out, drove to I-390, and turned south.

“They weren’t police, huh?” Mattie said.

“No,” said Jane. “I’m pretty sure they were men who wanted to kidnap you to force Jimmy to come back.”

“Where are we going?”

“Hanover, New Hampshire.”

“What’s there?”

“Jimmy.”





18



Jane drove along Route 20 to the east, going steadily through small towns where the high school, town hall, and public library were yards from each other, all of them dark. There were long stretches of open farmland. She had been this way dozens of times, and each part was familiar to her, as were the many places where she could turn down a barely marked cross street and disappear. Mattie was silent for a time, and Jane concentrated on being sure that nobody was following. Then Mattie seemed to decide she had waited long enough to talk.

“Where did you leave my car?”

“The long-term parking lot at the Rochester airport.” She reached into her pocket. “Here are your keys, while I’m thinking about it.” She placed them in Mattie’s hand.

“Why the airport?”

“A few reasons,” Jane said. “People fly out of an airport and sometimes don’t come back for a month or two, so your car won’t get towed before then. If the police find it, or the men who were trying to kidnap you find it, they’ll come to the conclusion that you drove it there and left town. They’ll waste valuable time finding out which flight you might have taken, and where it was going. The longer it takes for them to find the car, the more flights will have left Rochester. If they’re persistent, they’ll get lists of people on each of those flights, but they won’t see your name. They’ll try to figure out which names might be ones you could have used. You wouldn’t pretend to be George, but you might have been Nancy or Maria. Or since you probably didn’t plan this far in advance, they’ll try to investigate people who flew standby. If they’re imaginative, they’ll think of all kinds of other things to look for. All of it will keep them occupied. It will give them false hopes that will only result in disappointment and frustration and fatigue.”