Seaver tried to look at the issue of the signature from a positive point of view. Would leaving an unsigned note in the room down the walk protect Seaver from suspicion if the ones who found it were the police? No. It had his room number on it. He wrote “Seaver” clearly at the bottom of the page. Seaver looked at it for a moment, crumpled it up, and threw it into the wastebasket. What had he been thinking of? This was not the time to get impatient and do something foolish.
Seaver walked back past Earl’s room and slogged off through the snow toward his car. When he got to it, he had to clean the snow off the windshield and the rear window with his bare hands. He started the engine and then sat in the car holding his cold fingers over the defroster for a minute or two until the numbness went away and he felt ready to drive. While he was at it, he would buy some gloves, too, and a hat.
Jane crouched behind the door and listened. When the knocking on the door had stopped, she had watched the man walk off and disappear into Room 3165. She had waited a few minutes, then returned to the work of packing up the men’s belongings. She’d had a half-formed plan to take all of them out the back window of the room and bring the Toyota around the building and out of sight before she began loading.
But then she had been startled by the heavy crunching sound of footsteps outside the door. She crouched beside it and clutched the pistol she had taken off the second man. She stayed where she was, barely breathing, until she heard the footsteps again, this time getting fainter as the man moved off across the lot.
She recovered a little of her composure as she watched the man ineptly sweep the thick layer of new-fallen snow off his windshield and rear window onto his own feet, then drive off and have the pile of snow he had left on the roof slide down to cover his rear window again. The snow meant that the car had been here for hours, and the dress shoes and suit pants the man was wearing meant that he had probably come here from somewhere else and been caught unprepared by the early snowfall.
Jane’s eyes rested on the elaborate carrying case for the fancy sniper rifle. She put on her gloves, knelt on the floor beside it, opened it, and began to take out the rifle parts that she had hidden in her pack and place them, one by one, in the precisely shaped indentations of the travel case. Magazine here, suppressor here, foregrip here, bolt here, buttstock here. There was a peculiar satisfaction to the task. It was like feeling the pieces of a puzzle slip perfectly into the spaces where they belonged.
When she had finished, she loaded all of the items she had found in the room into the Toyota. Then she carefully walked down the snowy pavement, stepping in the man’s footprints to Room 3165. She used a credit card to open the door and looked around her: a single suitcase, a suit hanging in the closet. She searched the suitcase, but there was nothing in it but men’s clothing with brand names that could be bought anywhere. She went to the closet and looked at the label sewn inside the coat of the suit: Callicott Haberdashery, Las Vegas. It could hardly be a coincidence that a man who bought his clothes in Las Vegas had knocked on the door of the two shooters she had met in the Montana mountains. He must be one of the team.
She went into the bathroom and looked at the items he had left on the counter: razor, toothpaste, comb, hairbrush, deodorant—just the usual stuff. She stepped back into the other room and noticed the wastebasket. She reached inside, unfolded the single piece of crumpled paper, and read it: “Come see me in Room 3165. Seaver.”
She had heard that name. Seaver was one of the names that Pete had mentioned when he was talking about the casino. Seaver was the one who had been told somebody was a problem just before Pete had read an obituary. But he hadn’t been some hit man. He was the chief of security for the whole company.
Jane put the crumpled paper back into the wastebasket. Seaver was the customer, the one who had hired the killers. He was the one who had been sitting in Las Vegas all this time, comfortable and immune, while they had gone out to hunt Pete Hatcher for him. They had murdered a young policeman in Denver and some unsuspecting tourist in Swan Lake, but nothing they had done could ever reflect on Seaver. He had kept his distance until now. What was he doing up here? Was he checking up on his employees? No. What could he say that would have made them try harder, and what sanctions could he apply if they failed? Probably he had considered it safer to hand them their final payment as soon as they came out of the mountains so they wouldn’t knock on his door in Las Vegas. It didn’t matter. He was here.
Jane hurried out to the Toyota, took one piece of luggage out of the cargo bay, went back into Seaver’s room, and knelt to slide it under the bed.
Jane drove to a supermarket in Whitefish, unloaded the rest of the men’s belongings into the big Dumpster behind the building, then drove back to Kalispell. It was the middle of the night when she parked the Toyota outside the gate of the rental agency. She threw the key over the fence so it hit the door of the office and dropped to the top step, where they couldn’t help finding it. Then she walked to the small airport at the edge of town and paid in hundred-dollar bills for a seat on the first flight to Los Angeles.
It was not until she was sure the weather had cleared enough and her flight was boarding that she went to a pay telephone and made her call to the police. She said quickly, “There’s a man in Room 3165 at the Rocky Mountain Lodge. He told me last night he killed that guy over in Swan Lake.” The woman on the other end was talking over her insistently, saying, “Your name, please. Give me your name.” But Jane said, “He showed me the gun,” and hung up. Probably the woman had not picked up everything she was saying, but it didn’t matter. They recorded all the calls, and in a minute she would be playing it back for some superior.
33
Seaver was in a daze. None of this felt real to him. The cell was like something out of the movies: old, with things written on the walls that had come from a succession of madmen stretching back at least a generation, thoughts that no functioning brain could contain scrawled in letters like shrieks, with every fifth word misspelled, and anatomical pictures that made him queasy.
Seaver couldn’t be here, not in his waking life. When the door had burst inward onto the floor he had been lying in bed, so maybe he had been asleep and what he saw now just proved that his subconscious was getting better at constructing nightmares. The guns had all been pointed at him as the intruders sidestepped to spread out around the bed. Some of the men had looked at him with cold contempt, but the faces of others were empty, just concentrating on lining up the sights with his chest, his head, his belly, waiting to fire.
He had known enough to lie motionless on his back, both arms stretched out from his sides as though he were being crucified. He had known that speaking was a bad strategy, not only because he might say something that would come back to haunt him but also because it was in his best interest to keep the ones with the empty faces calm. They would do the job they had been sent to do, and then they would realize they had the wrong man and leave.