Dance for the Dead Read Online Free PDF

into this knowing that whoever was near this little
boy might be murdered.”
    She looked at him as though she
were trying to decide whether he was intelligent or not. Finally, she
said, “An innocent little boy is going to die. You’re
either somebody who will help him or somebody who won’t. For
the rest of your life you’ll be somebody who did help him or
somebody who didn’t.”
    The judge stared down at his
desk for a few seconds, his face obscured by the deep shadows. When
he looked up, his jaw was tight. “You are a criminal. The
system hates people like you. It has special teeth designed to grind
you up.”
    As she watched him, she could
see his face begin to set like a death mask. He pressed his intercom
button. “Tell the officers to come in.” He began to
write, filling in lines on a form on his desk.
    The two police officers swung
the door open quickly and walked inside. The man had his right hand
resting comfortably on the handle of the club in his belt.
    The judge said, “I’ve
finally straightened this out. Her real name is Mahoney. Colleen Anne
Mahoney. She was attacked by those suspects on the way into the
courthouse. Apparently it was a case of mistaken identity, because
she had no connection with the Phillips case. I’m giving you a
release order now, and I want all records – prints,
photographs, and so on – sealed… no, destroyed. Call me
when it’s been done.” He handed the female officer the
paper. “I want to avoid any possibility of reprisals.”
    “Will do, Judge,”
said the policewoman. Kramer’s instinct about her was
confirmed. She had a cute little smile.
    The policeman opened the door
for Jane Whitefield, but this time nobody touched her. She didn’t
move. “You should have those teeth checked.”
    He shrugged. “The system
was never meant to rule on every human action. Some things slip
through.”
    She stared at him for a second,
then said simply and without irony, “Thank you, Your Honor,”
turned, and walked out of his office.
     
2
     
    Jane
Whitefield drove her rental car down Fairfax past the high school,
the old delicatessens and small grocery stores and the shops that
sold single items like luggage or lamps, beyond the big white CBS
buildings and then into the hot asphalt parking lot at Farmers’
Market, where she found refuge from the Southern California sun in
the cool shadow between two tour buses. The market was crowded on
Saturdays, and it took her a few minutes of threading her way among
the hundreds of preoccupied people to find the pet store. There were
two glass enclosures out front where puppies lay sleeping with their
smooth little potbellies in the air.
    She
bought two cubical birdcages that had one side that could be opened
for cleaning, and a two-pound bag of bird feed that was peppered with
sunflower seeds. She walked across the market to a craft store where
people bought kits for making bead jewelry. She drove out of the
market and headed northward toward the hills, but then stopped only a
few blocks up when she saw a secondhand store that looked as though
it might have the right kind of teddy bear. Then she drove the
winding road over Laurel Canyon to the San Fernando Valley, and on
across the flats to the campus of the California State University at
Northridge. She had been past the school once years ago, and carried
a picture of it in her mind. It was the right kind of habitat.
    Jane had not done this in years,
but she was very good at it. She drove around the nearly empty campus
until she found a long drive with a row of tall eucalyptus trees
beside it and a few acres of model orchard beyond them. She parked
her car in the small faculty parking lot behind some kind of science
building and carried her cages to the eucalyptus trees. Nearly
everyone on campus seemed to be in a library or dormitory, so she had
the luxury of silence while she worked.
    She propped open the sides of
the cages with sticks that had fallen from the trees, took the