Shadow Woman by Thomas Perry

Before she
even got to the bills, she could see they had something. It was a
thick monthly bank statement with a stack of canceled checks inside.
She curbed her eagerness and handed it to Earl, then opened the
bills, one by one. There was the power bill, which was worth nothing.
There was the phone bill, which was worth a lot because it would have
the numbers he had called and the cities. There was a bill for rent
on this apartment. When she saw the envelope with the Visa logo on it
she felt hopeful, but then she saw it wasn’t a bill at all but
an offer for a new card. Earl stuffed the mail into Linda’s
purse and stood up.
    They put on the latex medical
gloves and began to search the apartment. She could tell that
Hatcher had not been given much time to prepare before he left. There
were objects here that were worth money and could have been sold or
pawned – gold cufflinks and rings, even a good watch with a
couple of small diamonds on the dial. But the same objects told her
that somebody had given him a lesson or two about disappearing.
Distinctive jewelry was as good as a scar or bright red hair. There
were a couple of empty frames on the mantel, but not one photograph
was left anywhere.
    Earl came and shone his Maglite
into the fireplace and carefully examined a pile of ashes. Whatever
had been burned in there, it wasn’t done for heat in Las Vegas
in June. Linda could see that Earl wasn’t going to be able to
tell what it had been, so she left the room.
    She found Hatcher’s
bedroom and systematically worked her way through it. From his pillow
and the sheets under it, she gathered a dozen hairs and put them in a
plastic bag. In the bathroom she made a list of all of the brand
names she could find – toothpaste, shaving cream, razors, soap,
shampoo, hairbrushes. She took the razors in case there was blood
from a nick and gathered more hair from the brushes. They were more
likely than the others to have been pulled out with the follicles.
She searched hard for prescription bottles, so she could find the
names of the doctors and pharmacies, but found none, so she moved to
the kitchen.
    She studied his eating habits.
He didn’t own anything even mildly interesting – a crepe
pan or a wok or a can of jalapenos or a jar of saffron. She dutifully
noted the brand names in the cupboards and refrigerator, but they
were all just the ones advertised on national television, and he had
kept little food in the house. He probably had worked late at night
and eaten in the hotel restaurants. She lingered at the refrigerator,
opening bottles and unwrapping packages of food in the freezer
because amateurs sometimes left valuables there, and he had left in a
hurry.
    Linda returned to the living
room and found Earl busy unzipping each cushion from the couch to
check inside the cover. The couch itself had been tipped over so Earl
could look up among the springs. He had also tipped over the coffee
table, chairs, and lamps. Earl heard her enter and said, “You
get started on the bookcase.”
    Pete Hatcher had not been much
of a reader. Linda wrote down the title, the author, and a
description of each book, removed it from the shelf, looked behind
it, held it up, and flipped through the pages with her thumb to see
if anything fell out or had been taped inside, but found nothing.
    At three in the morning Earl
began to tip the furniture back onto the depressions in the rug where
they had stood before, so Linda went from room to room making sure
she had left no signs of her presence.
    It was after five when they
reached their motel. As soon as they were in the room Linda lay down
on the bed and closed her eyes, but Earl was restless. After ten
minutes, the sound of him shifting in the squeaky chair by the table
and scribbling things on paper made her open her eyes. “Aren’t
you tired?”
    “Nope,” said Earl.
“I’ll sleep later.”
    “What are you doing?”
    “I’m trying to get a
picture of how to do this.” He frowned and