A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(91)

She walked past the ticket counters and along the glass front of the terminal, and caught her own reflection. It would have been hard to look less like Chelsea Schnell than Jane did. She was taller, her hair was longer and jet black, and her skin was olive. Near the doors there was a glass panel at right angles to the others, and she saw the reflection of the two men, now waiting outside the ladies’ room she had just left, watching the door and expecting the blond Chelsea to appear at any second.

In a moment Jane was out the automatic doors and making her way across the short-term lot to the Passat. As she walked, she took out her phone and called the cell phone she had left with Jimmy Sanders. She heard his “hello.”

“Hi, it’s me. She’s on a plane to Albany, so she’ll probably get to Manchester quite a bit later than we expected.”

“We’ll check to see what flights there are, and be there.”

“Is everything still okay?” Jane asked.

“We’re fine.”

“Good. Try hard to stay that way. Got to go.” She hung up, got into the Passat, and drove to the exit from the lot. As she paid the parking fee, she looked into the rearview mirrors and verified that no car was following her.





22



Daniel Crane sat at his desk in the storage office feeling miserable. He wasn’t entirely confident in his lawyer, Richard Brannigan, now that he’d hired him, but he was supposed to be one of the best. At first he had said that Crane had done the right thing by calling him in right away, because once a suspect retained a lawyer, the cops usually didn’t even bother to question him. It hadn’t worked out that way this time. They had taken him and his lawyer into a little room with cameras mounted on the ceiling and fired questions at him, and each one had felt like a puncture wound.

Brannigan had kept repeating, “Don’t answer that,” or “My client won’t answer that,” until it became annoying, but the cops had not relented.

The whole thing had been a disaster. The lead cop, a burly man with a bald head and piercing eyes said, “You gave that girl GHB and raped her. Want to tell us anything about that?” Of course it was a trap to make him give specific reasons why he was innocent, so he would contradict himself. Then there was: “You know, she has permanent brain damage, and you did that to her.” He was aware that it was perfectly legal for them to lie to him in an interrogation. “We’re talking to every woman you ever met, and a lot of them are giving us an earful.” It was all lies. Crane had never used the powder before Chelsea. They never mentioned the brain damage again, because they hadn’t fooled him.

He had drugged her because he loved her, and now he had lost her. The emergency operator had told the police that Verna Machak had come into the house, seen Chelsea, and called them, and the ambulance EMTs had brought one of the envelopes of powder from his house with them to the hospital. What right had EMTs had to do that, to search his house for drugs?

The emergency room doctors had called the cops, and then told Chelsea she had been drugged. Maybe if he’d had a chance to talk to her that morning he could have explained. He could have said he used it himself to help him sleep, and that she’d accidentally drunk from his glass that night while he was getting ready to drive her home. Or something. But he couldn’t stay and talk to her because he’d had to drive to Box Farm and wait for Salamone, who hadn’t even shown up, and then been taken to the police station and wasted the whole day while they tried to rattle and terrify him. He had wanted to get to the hospital and talk to her alone, but the cops had kept him until late in the day and then warned him not to try to see her, and his own lawyer had repeated it, so here he was.

Now she was gone. She had checked herself out of the hospital somehow, and she wasn’t at her house and she wasn’t answering her cell phone. He had sent men she knew to look for her at the hospital, and others to watch the airport, and others to talk to friends of hers to get them to call when she turned up. Nobody had accomplished anything. Thompson and Harriman had thought they’d seen her trying to fly to New York, but when they’d gotten closer, the woman had turned out to be somebody else.

Crane looked at his watch. It was only nine in the morning, and he felt like he’d worked a whole day already. He got up from his desk and went to stare out the window at the complex of storage bays. He had worked and struggled to get where he was. He had taken risks that other men would never have been brave enough to take. And then he had fallen in love.

He had never been able to understand women, never known how to get women to like him. He had never understood why they ignored him and picked dumber, poorer, less ambitious men.

He had suspected Chelsea was one of those women he’d heard and read about who liked a bit of an edge to her love life. Maybe she had liked a big strong dope like Nick Bauermeister because he overpowered her. He’d heard many women say they liked a man who was confident and in charge. A lot of women seemed to have a fantasy about being taken, so they didn’t have to make any decisions, just acquiesce, and let the man’s desires sweep them away. He thought about it and realized that he hadn’t heard any actual women say that in person. They had mostly been in magazine articles written by women. But they’d said it. When he had given Chelsea the powder that first time he’d been trying to give her that freedom from having to -decide—the freedom from fears about the propriety of having a relationship right after her boyfriend died, or her own shyness about being with a new man.