The Whispering Room Read online

  She stayed close to the wall, where the stair treads were less likely to creak, but they still announced her as she ascended.

  Although she wanted the front of the house, she toured the entire second floor to be certain she was alone. This was an upper-middle-class home in a desirable neighborhood, each bedroom with its private bath, though the chill in its vacant chambers gave rise in Jane to a presentiment of suburban decline and societal decay.

  Or perhaps the dark, cold rooms were not what fostered this apprehension. In fact, a persistent foreboding had been with her for nearly a week, since she had learned what some of the most powerful people in this new world of technological wonders were planning for their fellow citizens.

  She put her tote bag down by a window in a front bedroom and clicked off the flashlight and parted the draperies. She studied not the house directly across the street but the one next door to it, a fine example of Craftsman architecture.

  Lawrence Hannafin lived at that address, a widower since the previous March. He and his late wife never had children. Though only forty-eight—twenty-one years older than Jane—Hannafin was likely to be alone.

  She didn’t know if he might be an ally in waiting. More likely, he would be a coward with no convictions, who would shrink from the challenge she intended to put before him. Cowardice was the default position of the times.

  She hoped that Hannafin wouldn’t become an enemy.

  For seven years, she had been an FBI agent with the Critical Incident Response Group, most often assigned to cases involving Behavioral Analysis Units 3 and 4, which dealt with mass murders and serial killings, among other crimes. In that capacity, she’d killed only twice, in a desperate situation on an isolated farm. In the past week, on leave from the Bureau, she’d killed three men in self-defense. She was now a rogue agent, and she’d had enough of killing.

  If Lawrence Hannafin didn’t have the courage and integrity that his reputation suggested, Jane hoped that at least he would turn her away without attempting to bring her to justice. There would be no justice for her. No defense attorney. No jury trial. Considering what she knew about certain powerful people, the best she could hope for was a bullet in the head. They had the means by which to do much worse to her, the ability to break her, to scrub her mind of memories, rob her of free will, and reduce her to docile slavery.

  3

  * * *

  Jane took off her sport coat and shoulder rig and slept—not well—on the floor, with the pistol near to hand. For a pillow, she used a cushion from the window seat at the end of the second-floor hall, but she had nothing to serve as a blanket.

  The world of her dreams was a realm of shifting shadows and silver-blue half-light without a source, through which she fled malevolent mannequins who had once been people like her, but were now as tireless as robots programmed for a hunt, their eyes vacant of all feeling.

  The wristwatch alarm woke her an hour before dawn.

  Her limited toiletries included toothpaste and a brush. In the bathroom, with the dimmed flashlight in a corner on the floor, her face a hollow-eyed haunt in the dark mirror, she scrubbed away the taste of dream fear.

  At the bedroom window, she parted the draperies a few inches and watched the Hannafin house through a small pair of high-powered binoculars, her peppermint breath briefly steaming the window glass.

  According to his Facebook page, Lawrence Hannafin took a one-hour run every morning at dawn. A second-floor room brightened, and a few minutes later, soft light bloomed in the foyer downstairs. In headband, shorts, and running shoes, he exited the front door as the eastern sky blushed with the first rose-tinted light of day.

  Through the binoculars, Jane watched him key the lock, after which he safety-pinned the key in a pocket of his shorts.

  The previous day, she had observed him from her car. He had run three blocks south, then turned east into a neighborhood of horse properties, following riding trails into the undeveloped hills of brush and wild grass. He had been gone sixty-seven minutes. Jane required only a fraction of that time to do what needed to be done.

  4

  * * *

  Another Minnesota morning. A slab of hard gray sky like dirty ice. Scattered snowflakes in the still air, as if escaping through the clenched teeth of a reluctant storm.

  In her pajamas and fur-lined ankle boots, Cora Gundersun cooked a breakfast of buttered white toast dusted with Parmesan, scrambled eggs, and Nueske’s bacon, the best bacon in the world, which fried up thin and crisp and flavorful.

  At the table, she read the newspaper while she ate. From time to time she broke off a little piece from a slice of bacon to feed to Dixie Belle, who waited patiently beside her chair and received each treat with whimpers of delight and gratitude.

  Cora had dreamed again of walking unscathed through a fierce fire while onlookers marveled at her invulnerability. The dream lifted her heart, and she felt purified, as if the flames had been the loving fire of God.

  She hadn’t suffered a migraine in more than forty-eight hours, which was the longest reprieve from pain that she’d enjoyed since the headaches had begun. She dared to hope that her inexplicable affliction had come to an end.

  With hours to fill before she needed to shower and dress and drive into town to do what needed to be done, still at the kitchen table, she opened the journal that she had been keeping for some weeks. Her handwriting was almost as neat as that produced by a machine, and the lines of cursive flowed without interruption.

  After an hour, she put down the pen and closed the journal and fried more Nueske’s bacon, just in case this was the last chance she would have to eat it. That was a peculiar thought. Nueske’s had been producing fine bacon for decades, and Cora had no reason to suppose they would go out of business. The economy was bad, yes, and many businesses had folded, but Nueske’s was forever. Nevertheless, she ate the bacon with sliced tomatoes and more buttered toast, and again she shared with Dixie Belle.

  5

  * * *

  Jane did not cross the street directly from the vacant house to the Hannafin place. Carrying her tote bag, she walked to the end of the block, then half a block farther, before crossing the street and approaching the residence from the north, considerably reducing the chance that anyone would be looking out a window long enough to see both from where she had come and where she had gone.

  At the Craftsman-style house, cut-stone steps bordered with bricks led to a deep porch, at both ends of which crimson wisteria in early bloom cascaded from panels of lattice, providing privacy to commit illegal entry.

  She rang the bell three times. No response.

  She inserted the thin, flexible pick of the LockAid into the keyway of the deadbolt and pulled the trigger four times before all the pin tumblers were cast to the shear line.

  Inside, before she locked the door behind her, she called into the stillness, “Hello? Anyone home?”

  When only silence answered her, she committed.

  The furnishings and architecture were elegantly coordinated. Slate fireplaces with inset ceramic tiles. Stickley-style furniture with printed cotton fabrics in earth tones. Arts-and-Crafts lighting fixtures. Persian rugs.

  The desirable neighborhood, the large house, and the interior design argued against her hope that Hannafin might be an uncorrupted journalist. He was a newspaper guy, and in these days, when most newspapers were as thin as anorexic teenagers and steadily dying out, print reporters, even those with a major Los Angeles daily, didn’t command huge salaries. The really big money went to TV-news journalists, most of whom were no more journalists than they were astronauts.

  Hannafin, however, had written half a dozen nonfiction books, three of which had spent several weeks each on the bottom third of the bestseller list. They had been serious works, well done. He might have chosen to pour his royalties into his home.

  The previous day, using one of several patron computers at a library in Pasadena, Jane easily cracked Hannafin’s telecom provider and disco
vered that he relied on not just a cellphone but also a landline, which made what she was now about to do easier. She had been able to access the phone-company system because she knew of a back door created by a supergeek at the Bureau, Vikram Rangnekar. Vikram was sweet and funny—and he cut legal corners when he was ordered to do so either by the director or by a higher power at the Department of Justice. Before Jane had gone on leave, Vikram had an innocent crush on her, even though at the time she’d been married and so far off the playing field that it might as well have been on the moon. As a by-the-book agent, she had never resorted to illegal methods, but she’d been curious about what the corrupt inner circle at Justice might be doing, and she had allowed Vikram to show off his magic every time he wanted to impress her.

  In retrospect, it seemed as if she had intuited that her good life would turn sour, that she would be desperate and on the run, and that she would need every trick that Vikram could show her.

  According to phone-company records, in addition to a wall-mounted unit in the kitchen, there were three desk models in the Hannafin house: one in the master bedroom, one in the living room, one in the study. She started in the kitchen and finished in the master bedroom, removing the bottom of each phone casing with a small Phillips screwdriver. She wired in a two-function chip that could be remotely triggered to serve as an infinity transmitter or a standard line tap, installed a hook-switch defeat, and closed the casing. She needed only nineteen minutes to complete that work.

  If the big walk-in closet in the master bedroom had not suited her plan, she would have found another closet. But it was all right. One hinged door, not a slider. Although currently unlocked, the door featured a keyed deadbolt, perhaps because a small wall safe was concealed in there or maybe because the late Mrs. Hannafin had owned a collection of valuable jewelry. It was a blind lock from within the closet, with no operable thumbturn on that side. A stepstool allowed the higher shelves to be reached with ease.

  Hannafin had a lot of clothes with stylish labels: Brunello Cucinelli suits, a collection of Charvet ties, drawers filled with St. Croix sweaters. Jane hid a hammer among some sweaters and a screwdriver in an interior coat pocket of a blue pinstriped suit.

  She spent another ten minutes opening drawers in various rooms, not looking for anything specific, just backgrounding the man.

  If she departed the house by the front door, the latch bolt would click into place, but the deadbolt wouldn’t. When Hannafin returned and found the deadbolt wasn’t engaged, he would know that someone had been here in his absence.

  She exited instead by a laundry-room door that connected the house and garage, leaving that deadbolt disengaged, which he was more likely to think he had failed to lock.

  The side door of the garage had no deadbolt. The simple latch secured it when she stepped outside and pulled it shut behind her.

  6

  * * *

  Once more in the deserted for-sale house, now that morning sun provided cover, Jane switched on the lights in the master bathroom.

  As sometimes happened these days, the face in the mirror was not what she expected. After all that she had been through in the past four months, she felt weathered and worn by fear, by grief, by worry. Although her hair was shorter and dyed auburn, she looked much as she had before this began: a youthful twenty-seven, fresh, clear-eyed. It seemed wrong that her husband should be dead, her only child in jeopardy and in hiding, and yet no testament of loss and anxiety could be read in her face or eyes.

  Among other things, the large tote bag contained a long blond wig. She fitted it to her head, secured it, brushed it, and used a blue Scünci to hold it in a ponytail. She pulled on a baseball cap that wasn’t emblazoned with any logo or slogan. In jeans, a sweater, and a sport coat cut to conceal the shoulder rig and pistol, she looked anonymous, except that during the past few days, the news media had ensured that her face was nearly as familiar to the public as that of any TV star.

  She could have taken steps to disguise herself better, but she wanted Lawrence Hannafin to have no doubt as to her identity.

  In the master bedroom, she waited at the window. According to her watch, the runner returned sixty-two minutes after setting out on his morning constitutional.

  Because of his name recognition from the bestselling books and the audience he drew for the newspaper, he was free to work at home from time to time. Nevertheless, hot and sweaty, he would probably opt to shower sooner rather than later. Jane waited ten minutes before setting out to pay him a visit.

  7

  * * *

  Hannafin has been a widower for a year, but he still has not fully adjusted to being alone. Often when he comes home, as now, by habit he calls out to Sakura. In the answering silence, he stands quite still, stricken by her absence.

  Irrationally, he sometimes wonders if she is in fact dead. He’d been out of state on an assignment when her medical crisis occurred. Unable to bear the sight of her in death, he allowed cremation. As a consequence, he occasionally turns with the sudden conviction that she is behind him, alive and smiling.

  Sakura. In Japanese, the name means cherry blossom. It suited her delicate beauty, if not her forceful personality….

  He had been a different man before she came into his life. She was so intelligent, so tender. Her gentle but steady encouragement gave him the confidence to write the books that previously he only talked about writing. For a journalist, he was oddly withdrawn, but she extracted him from what she called his “unhappy-turtle shell” and opened him to new experiences. Before her, he was as indifferent to clothes as to fine wine; but she taught him style and refined his taste, until he wanted to be handsome and urbane, to make her proud to be seen with him.

  After her death, he put away all the photographs of the two of them together that she had framed in silver and lovingly arranged here and there about the house. The pictures had haunted him, as she still haunts his dreams more nights than not.

  “Sakura, Sakura, Sakura,” he whispers to the quiet house, and then goes upstairs to shower.

  She was a runner, and she insisted that he run to stay as fit as she was, that they might remain healthy and grow old together. Running without Sakura at first seemed impossible, memories like ghosts waiting around every turn of every route they had taken. But then to stop running felt like a betrayal, as if she were indeed out there on the trails, unable to return to this house of the living, waiting for him that she might see him and know that he was well and vital and staying true to the regimen that she had established for them.

  If ever Hannafin dares to speak such thoughts to people at the newspaper, they will call him sentimental to his face—maudlin and mawkish and worse behind his back—because there is no room in most contemporary journalists’ hearts for schmaltz unless it is twined with politics. Nevertheless…

  In the master bath, he cranks the shower as hot as he can tolerate. Because of Sakura, he does not use ordinary soap, which stresses the skin, but he lathers up with You Are Amazing body wash. His egg-and-cognac shampoo is from Hair Recipes, and he uses an argan-oil conditioner. All this seemed embarrassingly girly to him when Sakura was alive. But now it is his routine. He recalls times when they showered together, and in his mind’s ear, he can hear the girlish giggle with which she engaged in that domestic intimacy.

  The bathroom mirror is clouded with steam when he steps out of the shower and towels dry. His reflection is blurred and for some reason disturbing, as if the nebulous form that parallels his every move, if fully revealed, might not be him, but instead some less-than-human denizen of a world within the glass. If he wipes the mirror, it will streak. He leaves the steam to evaporate and walks naked into the bedroom.

  A most amazing-looking woman sits in one of the two armchairs. Although she’s dressed in scuffed Rockports and jeans and a nothing sweater and an off-brand sport coat, she looks as if she stepped out of the pages of Vogue. She’s as stunning as the model in the Black Opium perfume ads, except that she’s a blonde i
nstead of a brunette.

  He stands dumbstruck for a moment, half sure that something has gone wrong with his brain, that he’s hallucinating.

  She points to a robe that she has taken from his closet and laid out on the bed. “Put that on and sit down. We have to talk.”

  8

  * * *

  When she finished the last slice of bacon, Cora Gundersun was surprised to realize that she had eaten an entire pound, minus the couple slices she had fed to the dog. She felt as though she should be embarrassed by this gluttony, if not also physically ill, but she was neither. Indeed, the indulgence seemed justified to her, though for what reason she could not say.

  Usually, when finished eating, she at once washed the dishes and utensils and dried them and put them away. In this instance, however, she felt that cleaning up would be a waste of precious time. She left her plate and dirty flatware on the table, and she ignored the grease-coated frying pan on the stove.

  As she licked her fingers, her attention fell on the journal in which she had earlier been writing so industriously. For the life of her, she could not remember what her latest entry had concerned. Puzzled, she slid her plate aside and replaced it with the journal—but hesitated to open the volume.

  When she’d graduated college nearly twenty years earlier, she had hoped to become a successful writer, a serious novelist of some importance. In retrospect, that grand intention was only a childish fantasy. Sometimes life seemed to be a machine designed to crush dreams as effectively as a junkyard hydraulic press crumpled cars into compact cubes. She needed to earn a living, and once she began teaching, the desire to publish grew weaker year by year.