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signal that Jane was to wait while she answered
it, but Jane turned away. She heard the woman call, “Mrs.
Phillips?” but she was out the door.
    Jane waited down the street from
the parking garage. She had seen the row where the employees’
parking spaces were, and now she parked at the curb where she could
watch them.
    It
was not long before she saw the woman she had been waiting for. Nina
Coffey was in her forties and very slight with red hair that was
fading into a gray that muted it. Jane saw that she had the habit of
holding her keys in one fist when she came out of the elevator, so
she suspected that this was a woman whose profession had given her a
clear-eyed view of the planet she was living on. In her other hand
she held a hard-sided briefcase and a teddy bear.
    Jane waited for her to start her
car, drive to the exit, and move off down the street before she
pulled her own car out from among the others along the block. She
followed Nina Coffey at a distance, and strung two other cars between
them so she wouldn’t get too accustomed to the sight of Jane’s.
Coffey turned expertly a couple of times, popped around a corner and
then up onto a freeway ramp, and Jane was glad she had put the other
cars between them so that she had time to follow in the unfamiliar
city.
    She pushed into the traffic and
over to the same lane that Coffey chose and stayed there, letting a
couple of other cars slip in between them again. Coffey turned off
the freeway in a hilly area that the signs said was in Pasadena, and
Jane had to move closer. There seemed to be stoplights at every
intersection, and Nina Coffey was an aggressive driver who had a
knack for timing them. After the third one, Jane had to stop while
Coffey diminished into the distance. She turned right, then left,
then sped up five blocks of residential streets that had no lights,
turned left, then right again to come out three blocks behind her.
    Finally Nina Coffey came to a
street where she had to wait to make a left turn, and Jane caught up
with her again. When Coffey stopped in front of a modest two-story
house with a brick facade, Jane kept going. As she passed, she
studied the car that blocked the driveway and knew it was the right
house. The car was a full-sized Chevrolet painted a blue as
monotonous as a police uniform.
    The authorities had done exactly
as Jane had hoped they would. They were protecting Timmy from
everybody, without distinction – the people who wanted him
declared dead, the reporters, people who were sure to search the
family tree to suddenly discover they were relatives – and
without comment. They had put Timmy in the home of a cop while the
mess around him was sorted out.
    She spent fifteen minutes
driving around the neighborhood to look for signs that anyone else
had found the house. She saw no parked cars with heads in them, no
nearby houses with too many blinds drawn, and no male pedestrians
between twenty and fifty. She came back out on Colorado Boulevard
satisfied and drove up two streets before she found the place where
she wanted to park her car She had to climb over the fence at the
back of the yard and crouch in the little cinderblock enclosure where
the pool motor droned away and stare in the back window until she saw
Timmy. She watched him eat his dinner in the kitchen with two other
children, and then begin to climb the carpeted stairway to the second
floor. Upstairs, a light went on for a few minutes and then went out.
The other children weren’t much older than Timmy was but they
were still downstairs. She supposed he was still living on Chicago
time, where it was two hours later.
    The sun was low when Jane
decided how she would do it. She walked quietly to the back of the
house. In a moment she was up the fig tree and on the roof of the
garage. She walked across it to a second-floor window of the house,
tied a length of the jewelry wire into a loop, inserted it between
the window and the sill, and slowly twirled it until she