IN HER CAR ONCE MORE, a few blocks from Vinyl, Jane stopped at a traffic light. A young woman, crossing the street hand-in-hand with a little boy, approached from the left.
The child might have been six or seven. He bore no resemblance whatsoever to Travis, but Jane could not stop looking at him.
As woman and child passed in front of the Ford, the boy cupped a hand over his mouth as though shielding a cough. By the time they reached the sidewalk at the nearer corner, he seemed to be wheezing. His worried mother ushered him to a bus-stop bench and rummaged through her purse. She withdrew an inhaler of the kind used by asthmatics, and the boy accepted it eagerly.
The traffic light had changed to green without Jane realizing it. The driver of the Chevrolet crew-cab pickup behind her tapped his horn to inform her.
As she put down the driver’s window and waved the truck around her, she kept staring at the breathless boy, wanting to know he was all right. But the guy in the crew cab evidently had to be somewhere yesterday, and after only two seconds, he laid on his horn as if she should regard it as a siren and clear the way.
The mother had one arm around the boy’s shoulders, and when he took the inhaler out of his mouth, he didn’t have the throttled look that had contorted his features when he’d first sat on the bench.
In three seconds, Jane would have shifted her foot from brake to accelerator, but the guy in the pickup, with his hand still on the horn, eased his vehicle forward until it gently bumped the back of the Ford Escape. A bump, a tap, not hard enough to cause even the slightest damage. But the pickup was jacked high on oversize tires, the Chevy emblem centered in the bottom third of her rear window, and there was no reason—no damn excuse—for him to bully with his monster truck. She put her car in park and set the emergency brake and opened the driver’s door and got out into the street.
There were two men in the crew cab, both in the front seat. The driver let up on the horn as she got out of the car, then blasted her again. She stood staring up at him, in the grip not of personal anger but of fierce indignation.
She wondered how it could be possible that this jackass could be capable of such petty impatience hardly more than a day after the grisly horror on the Philadelphia expressway, one day after hundreds of fellow Americans had been torn limb from limb by the crashing jet and burned alive on their morning commute. She started walking toward the pickup.
The driver reversed, shifted into drive, swung the pickup into the adjacent lane, and accelerated around her as the specimen in the passenger seat called her stupid and shouted the C word and thrust his middle finger at her as if to curse her with some mortal blight.
Jane walked behind her Ford to the mother and child on the bus-stop bench. She said, “Is he okay?”
Wide-eyed and clearly shaken, the woman said, “What? Benny, you mean? Yes, he’s all right. Benny’s okay. He’ll be fine.”
Jane realized that the mother’s current anxiety was not so much related to her son’s condition as to the altercation that had taken place in front of her. These days, no one could know with certainty whether such a minor incident might escalate into real and terrible violence, with collateral damage. Perhaps as much as the driver of the pickup, Jane shared responsibility for this woman’s fear.
She said, “I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry. It’s just that…” But she could find no way to explain her own anguish at Travis’s vulnerability and the distance that separated her from him. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, and returned to the car.
Two blocks later, she pulled off the street and parked in the lot of a strip center with ten or twelve shops.
Her brief loss of control troubled her. No one enduring long-term stress and under a death threat could be faulted for letting the gears slip now and then, but she expected more of herself.
Part of her problem was sleep deprivation. She hadn’t slept more than six hours a night, sometimes four, in the past week.
The busiest enterprise in the strip center was the packaged-liquor store. She wasn’t much of a drinker. A little red wine now and then. She had only turned to vodka since being on the run, and only when too many bad nights piled up one after another; sometimes she needed sleep even at the expense of sobriety.
She went to the liquor store and bought a pint of Belvedere for later, after dinner, if the dark would not descend when she closed her eyes, if even behind lowered lids, memories of Nick bloomed as bright and full of motion as if they were events of the moment, if Travis was there in brightness as well, in a sun-seared place where slavery yet lived and children were sold into unthinkable service.
18
* * *
JANE DROVE WEST, through suburb after suburb, until she was far from the community in which she had earlier taken a motel room. It was unlikely that the people looking for her would be able to get a fix on her while she conducted these next bits of business. But if they located her, when their search team turned up, she would be clear of the area, and they would be nowhere near the motel where she had gone to ground.
She curbed the car under a street tree, near the Canoga Park Senior Citizen Center, and switched off the engine.
Less than two hours of daylight remained. The air was dry, and the sunshine seemed to splinter down through it, bright slivers piercing polished surfaces.
In addition to a pair of disposable cell phones in her luggage back at the motel, she had two in the car’s glove box. They had been purchased on different days in different towns. All of them had been previously activated; none had yet been used.
She took a phone from the glove box and called Sidney Root’s cell in Chicago. He answered on the third ring.
She had asked him to review his wife’s schedule to see if Eileen had attended any other conference or overnight event shortly before she had been at the Harvard conference where she had suffered the migraine.
“I don’t see how it could mean anything,” Sidney said, “but a week before the Harvard conference, she was two days in Menlo Park, interviewing Shenneck for a newsletter her nonprofit publishes.”
“Menlo Park, California?”
“Yes. Shenneck’s laboratories are there. You’ve heard of him?”
“No.”
“Bertold Shenneck. He’s racked up just about every important science prize except the Nobel.”
“Would you spell his name for me?”
Sidney spelled it. “He’s on the cutting edge—he is the cutting edge—when it comes to designing brain implants to eventually help people with motor neuron diseases, like later-stage ALS patients with locked-in syndrome. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”
“Lou Gehrig’s disease,” she said.
“That’s right. Eileen was quite impressed with him.”
The green tongues of the overhanging tree trembled in a mild breeze, and shadows licked at the scattered morsels of sunlight that glimmered on the windshield.
“The two nights—where did Eileen stay?”
“I thought you might ask. I’ve become accustomed to your FBI way of thinking, though it seems unduly suspicious. She stayed at the Stanford Park Hotel. About half a mile from Stanford University. I’ve been there once myself. It’s a lovely place.”
“You’ve visited Dr. Shenneck’s lab?”
“No, this was a few years ago. I was in the area to present a bid on an architectural project.”
“Do you know where your wife ate dinner?”
“The first night at the Menlo Grill, which is in the hotel. I ate there myself and recommended it to her.”
“And the second night?”
“Along with a few other people, she was a guest for dinner at Dr. Shenneck’s home. She found him and his wife very charming.”
“This was a week before the migraine she had at the Harvard conference.”
“Eight or nine days before the migraine.”
“Her first and only migraine,” Jane noted.
“I understand the need for a detective to question everything, but I can assure you Dr. Shenneck will lead you nowhere.”