Dance for the Dead (42 page)

After ten seconds, the picture
vanished in a wash of bright, popping static, and then the tape began
to rewind. Farrell turned to his audience of young men. They were
sitting on desks, leaning against walls, some even crouched on the
floor near the screen. Assembled like this, they were an
unprepossessing bunch, but he knew something about each of them that
made him feel confident. During his years as a cop, Farrell had
become very good at spotting a certain kind of young man early. “This
is the only picture we have of her at the moment, but when we find
something that’s a little clearer, we’ll try to work up
some still shots for you. Let’s run the tape again.”

As Farrell reached for the play
button he could hear the heavy footsteps on the stairs. He
straightened as the door swung open and Barraclough walked in. Few of
Farrell’s trainees had ever seen Barraclough before, but they
had just watched the tape, so none of them wondered who he was.
Barraclough’s empty gray eyes swept the crowd of young men.
When a few of the trainees fidgeted involuntarily to correct their
posture, the motion seemed to attract Barraclough’s gaze to
them. He stared, made some secret assessment, and moved on.

The tailored navy blue blazer
and gray pants Barraclough wore had the simplicity and precise lines
of a uniform. He turned away from the young men, slipped off the coat
and tossed it onto Farrell’s desk as a simple gesture to make
it clear that this place was his, and turned back to them in his
starched, Marine-creased white shirt. Strapped under his left arm was
a Browning nine-millimeter automatic in a worn shoulder holster,
carried muzzle-upward so it could be drawn with little movement.
Attached to the strap under the left arm was an extra ammunition
clip. The young men could see that this was not the gleaming, compact
sidearm of a successful security executive. It was the weapon of a
man who had been in gunfights with people who were now dead.

Barraclough judged that his
silence had served its purpose. “Mr. Farrell has probably told
you a little about me, but we should know each other better. Let me
begin by telling you what I’m not. I’m not your friend.”

A few eyes that had been
hovering in his general direction shot to his face but found no
comfort or reassurance there. “If you bring me what I want, I
will give you what you want. Simple as that. Mr. Farrell is not your
Boy Scout leader. I haven’t been spending money on training to
make men out of you, as though I gave a shit if you lived or died. I
don’t. I’m giving you the knowledge and experience to be
useful to me. If you want to make something out of yourself, keep
your eyes and ears open and you probably can.”

A few of the young men seemed to
mine some hint of hope from the notion that they could make something
of themselves. He appeared to want to oblige them. “I’ll
even tell you how the business works. If you win, you get to have the
prizes – the girls, the big house, the cars, people calling you
‘sir’ for the rest of your life. If you lose, you’re
dead. You may still walk around for a while before one of the winners
happens to notice you, but that’s just a technicality. Whatever
you have is his. You’re a failure, a victim, a corpse.”

Barraclough looked at them with
his empty, unreadable eyes for a moment, then spoke again. “I
know at least some of you must have noticed that a couple of guys
didn’t come back after this last trip. I’m here to tell
you what happened to them. They’re dead. Mr. Farrell and I left
them to guard an unarmed, incapacitated prisoner, and they let the
woman you saw on the tape sneak in and poison their breakfast.”
He shook his head in amazement and chuckled. “If she hadn’t
used enough poison, I would have had to kill them myself.”

A few of the trainees exchanged
nervous grins, but Barraclough’s smile dissolved. “That’s
the other part of our deal: I will always tell you the truth. If
you’re stupid, you’re a liability. You won’t just
hurt yourself, you’ll hurt me. I am not going to let that
happen. Not for them, not for you.”

He glanced at Farrell, who was
standing near the door. “Mr. Farrell is going to give you
specific assignments over the next day or two. But here’s the
short version. That woman is all I want right now. When I get her, I
want her breathing.” He nodded to Farrell, picked up his coat,
and slipped it on as he walked out the door.

Barraclough went down the back
stairs and across the parking lot to the next street, where he had
left his car, and began the long drive to the Intercontinental
Security building in Irvine. He could not keep his mind off that Jane
woman. He wanted to tear her head off with his hands. She had
blundered into his way when he was at the edge of a triumph, and the
collision had obliterated years of small, painfully won successes:
years on the police force, always working harder than the others,
taking more risks, gradually building a reputation; more years at
Intercontinental Security, always working tirelessly, always looking
for a way up.

After he had come to
Intercontinental, Barraclough had focused his attention on each of
the divisions in turn: Home Security, Retail Security, Detectives.
Slowly he had brought each of them up to modern standards, and the
management team in Chicago had responded by making him Director of
Western Regional Operations. But Barraclough had not been working for
a promotion. He had always lived by his ability to see farther down
the path than anyone else, and he had already moved ahead of
Intercontinental’s management. All of his efforts to revitalize
the old security company were mere sideshows – preparations for
what was to happen in the little Van Nuys office of the separate
corporation he had formed called Enterprise Development.

Barraclough had designed
Enterprise Development to fit inside the skin of Intercontinental
Security. Its costs were hidden within the giant company’s
overhead, its personnel culled from Intercontinental’s
applicant pool. When Enterprise Development conducted its business, a
pretext was constructed so that the employees and equipment of
Intercontinental’s offices in twenty-six cities could be set to
work identifying fingerprints, searching for cars, analyzing traces,
performing surveillance.

Enterprise Development had been
invented to specialize in exploiting a small and neglected group of
criminals: the successful ones who had gotten away with large amounts
of money. Some were already wanted by the authorities in the United
States or elsewhere but were not actively hunted; others had not yet
been discovered or were merely suspected. Some had been convicted and
served sentences but had not made restitution. Barraclough used
Enterprise Development to identify them, hunt them down, and turn
them into cash.

In his first seven years of
hunting, Barraclough had recovered over seventy-five million dollars.
This had not been nearly enough, because the purpose of Enterprise
Development was not merely to make its owner rich; it was a device
for accumulating enough capital to buy control of Intercontinental
Security.

Barraclough had made the next
eighty million on only one find, the Timothy Phillips trust fund.
Seven years ago he had decided that Intercontinental Security should
obtain the Hoffen-Bayne account so that Enterprise Development could
have a look at what was going on inside. He had not known about
Timothy Phillips; he had simply realized that a company handling the
personal fortunes of so many people was a good place to hunt. He had
offered Intercontinental’s services for a price that
competitors could never match because the bid left no margin for a
profit.

When he had placed security
devices in the Hoffen-Bayne offices and the partners’ homes,
the customers had been interested in color and design, but circuitry
had been beneath their notice. It had never occurred to people like
Alan Turner that a little electronic box with glowing lights might be
just about anything. It had never even crossed Turner’s mind
that if his security system had a little microphone he could talk
into during an emergency, the microphone could also pick up what he
said when there was no emergency. He had sat all day under security
cameras and thought he was alone.

Once Barraclough had discovered
the account Turner was stealing from, the money belonged to
Barraclough. The man had been robbing clients for years, and all of
the people who took salaries for catching thieves had missed him.
Turner had been there for anyone to take, but only Barraclough had
found him.

Barraclough had worked Mary
Perkins with the same patience. Anybody could have read about her
trial in the newspapers, as he had, but he had waited until the feds
had taken their crack at her, and then he had taken his. The feds had
come up empty, and Barraclough had walked away with fifty-two
million.

His rage deepened. To have a
woman like this Jane take it all away from him was more than an
insult; it was a violation of the laws of the universe.

At ten o’clock in the
evening, Farrell made his way across the polished marble lobby of the
Intercontinental Security Services building, thinking about fate. Ten
years ago, when he had been a cop for almost ten years and a
detective for two, the captain had suddenly assigned him a new
partner, a kid named Barraclough. After Farrell had watched him work
for a few days, he had seen the future.

If Farrell kept on the way he
was going, the best he could hope for was twenty years with the
police department and a pension that wouldn’t be enough to
convince him that his life had been worth the effort. But ten years
ago it was already apparent that Barraclough wasn’t going to
end up like that, and if Farrell stuck with him, he wasn’t
either. At thirty, Barraclough was entering his prime, and what he
represented was a world that had no limits.

But tonight, as Farrell walked
toward the elevator that would take him up to Barraclough’s
office, he was a little nervous. He had not been able to think of a
way that this Jane woman could have found Mary Perkins except by
following him to the farm. If he had figured this out, then
Barraclough had too. No, he thought. He was not a little nervous. He
knew Barraclough better than anyone alive, and he was deeply,
agonizingly afraid. When he raised his hand to the elevator button,
he saw it start to shake.

Farrell wasn’t even sure
what made him most afraid. A bullet in the back of the head had its
attractions. It was quicker and kinder than most of the ways that
lives ended. Slowly he identified what he feared most. He feared
Barraclough's displeasure: not the bullet, but Barraclough’s
impulse to fire it, whether or not the trigger got pulled. This one
lapse might have convinced Barraclough that Farrell wasn’t like
Barraclough – that he was just one of the others, a loser.
After all these years, first teaching Barraclough and then following
him, Farrell would be lost, abandoned and exiled from the light. He
would be denied a share in Barraclough’s future.

He stepped out of the elevator,
walked to the big wooden door of Barraclough’s office, and
knocked quietly. No, that had been too quiet. Barraclough might think
he was weak and used up, maybe even afraid. Fear disgusted
Barraclough. Farrell gave a hard rap with his knuckles, then heard
Barraclough call “Come in.”

Farrell found him sitting behind
the big desk. He only looked up long enough to verify who had come in
the door, then went back to signing papers. He muttered, “The
fucking home office is waiting on these reports. That’s what
they do. They sit in that building in Chicago and read quarterly
reports. Talk to me.”

“The lines are all in the
water,” said Farrell. “I finally got the last of the boys
on their planes. With the ones we had out already, we should have
two-man teams in fifty-six airports by morning.”

“Are you sure they’ll
recognize her if they see her?”

“The ones who have seen
her in person will. The tape from the freeway should help the others,
but it’s mostly on you.” Farrell felt a chill. He had
given in to some subconscious need to remind Barraclough that Farrell
was not the only one who made mistakes. He tried to talk quickly, to
get past it before the sour taste of it turned Barraclough against
him. “But I’ve got people working on finding a decent
picture of her from surveillance footage in the places we know she’s
been – stores, hotels, and so on.”

Barraclough kept signing papers,
then moving each one to a pile at the corner of his desk. He seemed
to be listening, so Farrell went on. “I’ve got a couple
of technicians traveling around with the teams trying to find her
fingerprints where she touched something that might not have gotten
wiped off: hotel bathrooms get scoured with cleanser, but prints
might survive on a telephone receiver or on anything that was inside
a drawer. Rental cars sometimes sit on the lot for a few days before
they go out again. Fingerprints are still the best way to find out
who you’re really dealing with.”

Barraclough frowned as he
scrutinized a sheet that appeared to be covered with numbers, then
wrote something on it and set it beside the pile of papers. He looked
up, so Farrell said, “The credit checks on her fake credit
cards come in once a day. So far she hasn’t used any of them. I
figure she’s gone under somewhere to wait until Mary Perkins is
healthy enough to travel again.”

Barraclough looked down at his
papers again. Something he was reading caused a look of weariness and
impatience. “Is that it?”

Farrell said, “Just about.
Of course I’m trying a couple of long shots. We know she met
Mary Perkins in the L.A. County Jail. I hired a hooker to get herself
inside and ask questions of the other prisoners, to get us a lead on
where she lives.”

“You said a couple. What
else?”