Jeffery Deaver Hunting Time
To all my friends at the Kastens Hotel Luisenhof, in Hannover, for their true kindness and generosity during my recent trip to Germany. Danke Schoen!
To be human is to be an engineer.
Part One The Pocket Sun
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
1
The trap was simplicity itself.
And as usual with simple, it worked perfectly.
In the long-abandoned fourth-floor workshop of Welbourne & Sons Fabricators, Colter Shaw moved silently through dusty wooden racks stacked with rusty tanks and drums. Twenty feet ahead, the shelves ended and beyond was a large open area, filled with ancient mahogany worktables, scuffed and stained and gone largely to rot and mold.
Here stood three men, wearing somber business suits, engaged in conversation, offering the animated gestures and the untroubled voices of those who have no idea they’re being watched.
Shaw paused and, out of sight behind a row of shelves, withdrew a video camera. It was similar to any you’d pick up on Amazon or at Best Buy, except for one difference: there was no lens in front. Instead the glass eye was a tiny thing mounted on an eighteen-inch flexible stalk. This he bent at a ninety-degree angle and aimed around the side of the storage shelves before hitting record.
After a few minutes, when the men’s backs were to him, he stepped out of his hiding place and moved closer, slipping behind the last row of shelves.
Which was when the trap sprung.
His shoe caught the trip wire, which in turn pulled a pin from the supporting leg of the shelf nearest to him, releasing an avalanche of tanks and cans and drums. He rolled forward onto the floor, avoiding the bigger ones, but several slammed onto his shoulders.
The three men spun about. Two were of Middle Eastern appearance — Saudi, Shaw knew. The other was Anglo, as pale as the others were dark. The taller of the Saudis — who went by Rass — held a gun, which he’d drawn quickly when Shaw made his ungainly appearance. They joined the intruder, who was rising from the grainy floor, and studied their catch: an athletic blond man in his thirties, wearing blue jeans, a black T and a leather jacket. Shaw’s right hand was gripping his left shoulder. He winced as his fingers kneaded the joint.
Rass picked up the spy camera, looked it over and shut it off. He pocketed the device and Shaw said goodbye to twelve hundred dollars. This was not a priority at the moment.
Ahmad, the other Saudi, sighed. “Well.”
The third man, whose name was Paul LeClaire, looked momentarily horrified and then settled into miserable.
Shaw’s blue eyes glanced at the collapsed shelf with disgust and he stepped away from the drums, some of which were leaking sour-smelling chemicals.
Simplicity itself...
“Wait!” LeClaire frowned. “I know him! He’s working for Mr. Harmon. He’s in human resources. I mean, that’s what he said. But he was undercover! Shit!” His voice cracked.
Shaw wondered if he was going to cry.
“Police?” Ahmad asked LeClaire.
“I don’t know. How would I know?”
“I’m not law,” said Shaw. “Private.” He turned a stern face to LeClaire. “Hired to find Harmon’s Judas.”
Ahmad walked to a window and looked out, scanned the alley. “Anyone else?” Directed at Shaw.
“No.”
The man then stepped to the front of the workshop, his body language suggesting taut muscles beneath the fine gray suit. He slowly opened the door, looked out, then closed it. He returned to the others. “You,” he said to LeClaire. “Check him. Weapons. And whatever’s in his pockets.”
“Me?”
Ahmad: “We weren’t followed. You were careless.”
“No, I wasn’t. Really. I’m sure.”
Ahmad lifted a palm: We’re not paying you to whine.
LeClaire, more dismal by the moment, walked forward. He patted down Shaw cautiously. He was doing a sloppy job and if Shaw had been carrying, which he was not, he would have missed the semiauto Shaw often wore on his hip.
But his uneasy fingers managed to locate and retrieve the contents of Shaw’s pockets. He stepped away, clutching the cell phone, cash, a folding knife, a wallet. Deposited them on a dust-covered table.
Shaw continued to knead his shoulder, and Rass tilted his head toward him, silently warning him to be cautious in his movements. Rass’s finger was outside the trigger guard of the pistol. In this, he knew what he was doing. On the other hand, the gun, with its mirrored sheen of chrome plating, was showy. Not the sort a true pro would carry.
Never draw attention to your weapon...
LeClaire was looking toward an open attaché case. Inside was a gray metal box measuring fourteen inches by ten by two. From it sprouted a half-dozen wires, each a different color. To Shaw he said, “He knows? About me? Mr. Harmon knows?”
Colter Shaw rarely responded to questions whose answers were as obvious as the sky.
And sometimes you didn’t answer just to keep the inquirer on edge. The businessman rubbed thumb and index finger together. Both hands. Curiously simultaneous. The misery factor expanded considerably.
Ahmad looked at the phone. “Passcode.”
Rass lifted the gun.
One wouldn’t be much of a survivalist to get killed over a PIN. Shaw recited the digits.
Ahmad scrolled. “Just says he’s coming to the factory to check out a lead. It’s sent to a local area code. Others to the same number. He has our names.” A look to LeClaire. “All of ours.”
“Oh, Christ...”
“He’s been onto you for a while, Paul.” Ahmad scrolled some more, then tossed the phone to a desk. “No immediate risk. The plans still hold. But let’s get this over with.” He removed a thick envelope from his pocket and handed it to LeClaire, who, not bothering to count his pieces of silver, stuffed it away.
“And him?” LeClaire’s strident voice asked.
Ahmad thought for a moment, then gestured Shaw back, against a wall.
Shaw walked to where the man indicated and continued to massage his shoulder. Pain radiated downward, as if pulled by gravity.
Ahmad picked up the wallet and riffled through the contents, then put the billfold in his pocket. “All right. I know who you are, how to find you. But I don’t think that troubles you so much.” He scanned Shaw, face to feet. “You can take care of yourself. But I also have the names of everyone on your in-case-of-emergency list. What you’re going to do is tell Harmon you tracked the thief here but by the time you managed to get into the factory we were gone.”
LeClaire said, “But he knows it’s me!”
Ahmad and Rass seemed as tired of the whimpering as Shaw was.
“Are we clear on everything?”
“Couldn’t be clearer.” Shaw turned to Paul LeClaire. “But I have to ask: Aren’t you feeling the least bit guilty? There are about two million people around the world whose lives you just ruined.”
“Shut up.”
He really couldn’t think up any better retort?
Silence filled the room... No, near silence, moderated by white noise, unsettling, like the hum of coursing blood in your skull.
Shaw looked over the configuration of where each man stood and he realized that examining the wallet and the in-case-of-emergency threat were tricks — to get him to move to a certain spot in the room, away from the drums that had tumbled to the floor when the trap sprung. Ahmad had no intention of letting him go. He simply didn’t want to take the risk of his partner shooting toward canisters that might contain flammable chemicals.
Why not kill him and buy time? The Saudis would be out of the country long before Shaw’s body was discovered. And as for LeClaire, he’d done his part, and they couldn’t care less what happened to him. He might even be a good fall guy for the murder.
Ahmad’s dark eyes turned toward Rass and his shiny pistol.
“Wait,” Shaw said harshly. “There’s something I—”
2
“You’re a lucky SOB, Merritt.”
The pale and gaunt prisoner, unshaven, brows knit, looked at the uniformed screw.
The guard glanced at Merritt’s balding head, as if just realizing now that the man had more hair when he’d begun serving his sentence than now. What a difference a near year makes.
The men, both tough, both fatigued, faced each other through a half-inch of bulletproof glass, a milky sheet as smeared as the walls were scuffed. The business end of eighty-year-old Trevor County Detention had no desire, or reason, to pretty itself up.
Slim, tall Jon Merritt was dressed in a dark suit — the deepest shade of navy blue, good for job interviews and funerals. It was a size too big. A complementing white shirt too, frayed where frays happen. The last time he had worn this outfit was more than ten months ago. In the interim his garb, not of his choosing, had been bright orange.
“You’re looking like an ace,” the guard said. Larkin was a large Black man whose uniform was much the same shade as Merritt’s suit.
“Oh, I just shine, don’t I?”
The guard paused, maybe wondering how stinging the sarcasm was meant to be. “Here you go.”
Merritt took the envelope that contained his wallet, watch and wedding ring. The ring went into his pocket, the watch onto his wrist. The battery had behaved and the instrument showed the correct time: 9:02 a.m.
Looking through the wallet. The bills — $140 — were still there, but the envelope no longer contained the coins he’d had. A credit card and an ATM card were present too. He was surprised.
“I had a phone, a book, paperback. Socks. A pen.”
The pen he’d used to jot notes to his attorney at the hearing. It was a nice one, the sort you put a refill in, not threw out.
Larkin looked through more envelopes and a cardboard box. “That’s all that’s here.” He lifted a huge hand. “Stuff disappears. You know.”
More important: “And some work I did in the shop. William said I could keep it.”
The screw consulted a sheet. “There’s a box outside the door. On the rack. You didn’t come in with it so you don’t gotta sign.” He prowled through more paperwork. Found two envelopes, business size, and pushed them through.
“What’s that?”
“Discharge documents. Sign the receipt.”
Merritt did and put the envelopes in his pocket fast, feeling that if he read them now, he’d see a mistake. The screw could catch it too and say, sorry, back inside.
“And these.” He slid Merritt a small business card. “Your parole officer. Be in touch in twenty-four hours. No excuses.” Another card made the short trip. It was a doctor’s appointment reminder. It was for eleven today.
“Take care, Merritt. And don’t come back.”
With not a single word he turned. The lock buzzed and snapped and the thick metal door opened. Merritt walked through it. Beside the door, on the rack Larkin had mentioned, was a cardboard box, about one by two feet, j. merritt on the side. He picked it up and walked to the exit gate in the chain-link. The barricade clattered as it crawled sideways.
Then Jon Merritt was outside, on the go-where-you-will sidewalk.
He felt odd, disoriented. Dizzy. This did not last long. It was like the time he and some cop friends went party boat fishing and it took him a little time to find his sea legs.
Then, steadying, he turned south. Inhaling deeply, wondering if the air outside tasted different from the air inside. Couldn’t tell.
His feet hurt already. Merritt had enough cash to buy shoes — he wasn’t sure if his cards still worked — but it was easier and cheaper to go to the U-Store facility, where his possessions resided.
Supposedly.
The light changed and Merritt started across the asphalt, shoulders slumped, in his tight shoes and baggy, somber suit. On his way to a job interview.
Or a funeral.
3
“Wait. There’s something I—”
Colter Shaw’s words were interrupted by a loud bang from one of the drums that had tumbled to the floor. A huge, dense cloud of yellow gas poured from it and filled the room. In seconds it was impossible to see a foot ahead.
The men began choking.
“Poison!”
“What is it?”
“Some shit from the factory!”
The words dissolved into coughs.
“That man... He can’t leave here. Stop him. Now!” This was from Ahmad.
Rass couldn’t fire, though, not with the lack of visibility.
Shaw crouched, staying under cover of the cloud. He moved in a wide circle.
“I can’t see him!”
“There! He’s there! Going for the window.”
“We’re four stories up. Let him jump.” Ahmad again.
“No, he’s going the other way.” Panicky LeClaire’s voice was high.
“It’s going to kill us! Out. Now!”
Their voices fell into choked shouts and obscenities and then went silent as they pushed toward the door.
Shaw felt his way back through the shelves and to the window by which he’d entered the factory. Choking, he descended the fire escape to a decrepit dock that jutted into the river. He jogged over the uneven wood, dark with creosote and slick with ancient oil, and climbed down into an alley that ran beside the factory from the river to Manufacturers Row.
He walked to the dumpster that sat halfway down the alley and worked on clearing his lungs, hawking, spitting, inhaling deeply. The coughing stopped, but what he was breathing here wasn’t much better than the fumes. The air was laced with the acrid off-gases from the wide Kenoah River, its hue jaundice brown. He’d come to know the scent quite well; the distinctive sour perfume hung over much of central Ferrington.
At the dumpster, whose top was open, he scanned around and saw no one nearby. First he lifted out the gray Blackhawk inside-the-belt holster containing his Glock, the model 42, and clipped it in place. Then a thirty-two-ounce bottle of water. He filled his mouth and spit several times. Then he drank down half of what remained and collected his personal effects.
Hand on the grip of his weapon, he looked about once more.
No sign of Rass and his small silver gun, or the other men. Were they searching for him?
Walking to the front of the alley, Shaw noted that the answer was no. The three hurried away from the factory, Ahmad clutching the briefcase. The Saudis climbed into their Mercedes, and LeClaire his Toyota. The vehicles sped off in different directions.
Shaw returned to the dumpster.
Reaching inside, he extracted a backpack and into it he slipped the gray metal box that had been in the attaché case upstairs. He slung the bag over his shoulder and exited the alley onto gloomy Manufacturers Row. He turned right, pulling a phone from the pack and sending several texts.
He then continued his walk toward downtown Ferrington.
Thinking of the trap.
Indeed it was simple and efficient. But it was also one of Shaw’s making, not one set by the three men in the room.
Hired by a corporate CEO recently to stop the theft of a revolutionary industrial component, which had been designed by the company’s most brilliant engineer, Shaw had narrowed the list of suspects to LeClaire. The scrawny, nervous IT man — a compulsive and bad gambler — had arranged to sell the device to the Saudi buyers. Shaw had learned that the transfer was going down in the factory this morning.
While the CEO just wanted the device — known by the acronym S.I.T. — recovered and the identity of the thief revealed, Shaw thought it was a better idea to swap the real one for a fake that contained a GPS tracker, which would reveal its ultimate destination and, ideally, the identity of the buyer.
Shaw’s private eye, based in the nation’s capital, had found a PI in Ferrington, Lenny Caster. He’d assembled tools, surveillance gear and some other supplies. Then, last night, the two men had rigged the trip wire in the Welbourne & Sons building. Shaw had placed a military-style smoke bomb in one of the oil drums that would fall when the “trap” sprung.
In a van not far away, Caster had been monitoring the entire incident via a bug planted in the workshop. When he heard their code — “Wait. There’s something I” — he triggered the bomb, releasing the dense smoke, whose recipe Shaw and his siblings had been taught by their father, obscuring clouds like this one being just another aspect of the art and science of survivalism. Shaw had made the batch himself with potassium chlorate oxidizer, lactose as a fuel and solvent yellow 33, along with a dash of sodium bicarbonate to decrease the temperature of the burn. Trespassing was one thing; arson another.
Once the smoke had filled the room, Shaw had pulled the mock-up of the device from the worktable drawer where he’d hidden it last night and did the swap. He’d then made his way to the window and dropped the real S.I.T. into the dumpster, forty feet below.
Now he was walking through the shadowy, soot-stained brick valley of abandoned factories and warehouses.
In a quarter mile he broke from that industrial graveyard into an expanse of huge, weedy lots — twenty or thirty acres of them — where facilities had once stood and were now bulldozed flat and filled with nothing but discarded cinder blocks, piles of brick, pipes and the trash that people had tossed over the chain-link. Flyers and sheets of newspapers and shattered Styrofoam cups chased one another in the soft spirally autumn wind.
Shaw had heard redevelopment awaited. His time in Ferrington told him that any glorious makeover would be a long time coming. If ever.
The sidewalk he was on veered right and joined the riverwalk beside the Kenoah.
The trio he’d just scammed would eventually learn that Shaw had made the swap. Would they want revenge against his in-case-of-emergency contacts? That would be time poorly spent. His private eye, Mack McKenzie, had ginned up an identity for him. The slim leather billfold LeClaire had relieved him of contained everything from driver’s license to credit cards to grocery store loyalty cards (new to Shaw; he’d never used one). Mack had even photoshopped him into a family portrait. He was married to a striking Latina; they had two well-scrubbed and photogenic children.
Shaw assessed a less than one percent chance of Rass or Ahmad traveling to Anchorage, Alaska, his fictional home, and even if they did they would not find the fictional Carter Stone and his fictional family.
He looked ahead, at his destination, a ten-story structure, red brick like most other buildings in downtown. On top was a large sign. The bottom was painted dark red and the color gradient changed, moving upward until, at the top, the shade was a bright yellow, the color of the sun on a cloudless day. The words over this backdrop were:
As he walked, he looked about. Not much reason for anyone to be in this neighborhood, and it was largely deserted. Some emaciated teen boys, in hoodies and loose jeans, leaned against or sat beneath graffitied walls, maybe hoping to sell some crack or meth or smack, or buy some. A man of gray pallor and indeterminate age lounged back, bundled in blankets despite the unseasonal warmth of the day. He sat in front of his homeless home of cardboard, with a strategic trapezoid of Sheetrock for the front door. He hadn’t bothered with a begging cup. A sex worker, female in appearance, shared the lethargy of the others, smoking and texting.
No one tried to solicit Colter Shaw, who wore the patina of cop.
Fifty yards up the walk, a tall man with shaggy blond hair was texting as he leaned against the concrete wall, four feet high, that separated the sidewalk from the river. He was facing the water, which was far below street level. There was no bank; the river borders were man-made: walls of cement or the foundations of the buildings.
As he approached the man, Shaw realized two things. He might or might not have actually been texting but he was definitely using the phone for another purpose — a mirror to watch the sidewalk, focusing specifically on Shaw himself.
The other observation was that the man was armed.
Never watch the hip looking for a gun; watch the hands...
Shifting the backpack to his left shoulder, unzipping his jacket, Shaw approached. When he was near, the man slipped his phone away, turned and smiled broadly.
“Ah, ah, here is Mr. Colter Shaw!” A mild accent. Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian. “No need for worries. I have been watching behind you on your fine stroll. No one is following. Even though are three people who might very much like to pay you visit.”
4
Never let surprise dull your awareness...
Shaw noted that the street remained unoccupied other than the weary folks he’d just passed.
The Slav was not going for a weapon.
No cars headed purposefully in his direction, ahead or behind.
Only when he assessed minimal threat — less than ten percent — did he turn fully to the man. He had an exceedingly angular face, high cheekbones and a pointed jaw. Curiously, despite the fair hair, his eyes were jet black. Shaw knew that genes could often be fickle.
The man too looked around. “How you like being here in this shithole? But who am I to talk? Where I am coming from, we have many poisoned cities. Thank you, Noble Leader! I been walking around. Is there single place here that doesn’t stink? I can’t find it! Okay, okay, I get to point before I get boring.”
The Slav clicked his tongue and his expression was one of admiration. “Smart, smart, what you did, Mr. Colter Shaw. Caught that thief, like mouse in a spring. Just beat me, a hair ahead. I was close on poor, sad Mr. Paul LeClaire. But you were more quick. Your bug was better than my bug.” A shrug. “Sometimes happens.
“So, what you do, Mr. Colter Shaw? You swap it for a fake and they not have any idea.” He leaned close and Shaw tensed, but the man merely inhaled. “Battlefield smoke... Very smart of you, very smart. Arab boys go back home, hook up the S.I.T. and get Chernobyled! Ha! I am loving this.”
Shaw asked, “Who’s your buyer?”
“Oh, Mr. So and So. Or maybe Ms. So and So. What you think, Mr. Colter Shaw?” He grew serious. “You think women screw you over in business world more than men? I think so. Now we talk... There is American expression.” He gazed over the river. “Talking... what? What it is? A bird.”
“Nothing to talk about. You know I’m not selling.”
“Ah. I remember: talking turkey! How much you make for this job?”
It was twenty thousand dollars.
Marty Harmon was wealthy by Ferrington standards, but his company was a start-up and had yet to make a profit. Since the products he was making were intended mostly to improve Third World living conditions, Shaw had signed on. Also, he liked the challenge of the job.
He said nothing.
“Tell you what I give you. Fifty thousand. You want gold, you want Bitcoin, you want Doge? Mix and match, you want. Even green money. But what bastards want that today?” He frowned. “Rubles? Oh, I make you millionaire with rubles. How about Gazprom stock? Always good.” A bright smile, then back to the serious visage. “One. Hundred. Thousand.” His index finger rose and fell with each number.
So, his employer was in Moscow, probably, rather than Minsk or Kiev. Given the rubles.
“What’s your name?” Shaw asked.
“Name? Name?” A roaring laugh. “My name is John F. Kennedy. No, I am lying. It’s Abraham Lincoln. There. That’s my name! One fifty. Cannot be more.”
“Well, listen, Abe,” Shaw said. “It’s not for sale.”
“I was thinking that would be answer. I was sure. Well, don’t worry, no, no.” He held his hands up. “No shoot-out at high noon. I know you have gun. I saw, I peeked. A little one — malen’kiy pistolet.”
Yes, Russian.
The man said, “Okay. Two hundred.”
So it could be more.
“No.”
“Fuckish.”
Not a word that Shaw was familiar with and in his reward business he’d collected a sizable vocabulary of street terms.
The Slav could see the discussions were winding down. His eyes narrowed. “Too bad. Too bad for you. Lose all that money.” He tapped his head. “I’ll have to think of something more cleverer.”
Delivered not with the tone of threat, though threat it was.
Shaw reciprocated, less subtly. “For your own sake, Abe, don’t follow me. We’re not alone.”
The man’s eyes narrowed further, then he looked around. Finally grinned. “Me? Why would I do that? I’m just tourist here! Hey, you see famous Water Clock?”
“No.”
“Oh, not to be missed, Mr. Colter Shaw. Not. To. Be. Missed.”
Shaw walked past him, continuing up the street, assessing the odds that the Slav would, despite what he’d said, draw his gun and play High Noon after all.
He put it around five percent. Abe Lincoln wasn’t stupid.
But he was desperate.
Fuckish...
Okay, maybe ten.
5
At last. His custom-made work shoes...
Jon Merritt closed his eyes at the relief of slipping his feet into what he’d worn on the job — when he had a job. Black leather, insets, lace-up. Steel-tipped toes. Occasionally necessary.
He was inside the tiny unit of U-Store, looking over his things, in plastic bins that had been filled haphazardly. Everything just dumped.
Into a backpack bearing the faded logo of a faded pro football team he placed clothing, some toiletries, the cardboard box containing the project from the metal shop — his chosen rehab activity in County.
He continued rag picking. Anything meaningful? Anything sentimental?
No.
Here was a trash bag of items from his former job. And trash bag it literally was, containing in addition a crushed soda can, an empty nail-polish bottle, a year-old slice of hard bread, long past mold. He dug through it and extracted a few things that might come in helpful.
After he pulled down the corrugated metal door, he relocked it and left the facility. Then he bused it across town, head against the glass, feeling the vibrations of the engine and the protest of the suspension on the weather-abused streets. The potholes and cracks were the same as when he went in. Ferrington’s infrastructure budget wasn’t going to miraculously improve in that short period of time. And even if it had, how much cash would have been siphoned off to flow into officials’ pockets?
Quite a bit, Jon Merritt knew very well.
Disembarking and walking three blocks, he entered the small oil-sweet-scented office of the rambling garage.
“Ebb.”
The owner blinked and froze. He was a troll of a man, with rolls of flesh below and pelts of hair above. Surprise filled his face. He stepped away from the engine of a large red Peterbilt. The wrench in his hand lowered. “Well. Jon. You’re...”
Merritt nodded outside. “Didn’t do much in the detailing department.” The white F-150 pickup was grimy and dusty and the windshield opaque yellow from last spring’s pollen. Branches and leaves crowned the hood and roof and lay thick in the bed, where the wind would not have swept them away.
Merritt believed they’d talked about storing the truck inside the garage, though he wasn’t positive. He’d been drunk when the conversation occurred. It was the day of his sentencing.
Maybe Ebb believed, or hoped, Merritt would die inside and somehow he could keep the truck. Only 154,000 miles on the odometer. Nothing.
The man took in Merritt’s unsmiling face. He was somewhat afraid now, knowing why Merritt had gone to prison. “Really, Jon. I’d known, she woulda been spic-and-span...” A new tack: “You’re paid up for two more years. I’ll get you a refund check. Pronto. Gimme an address.”
“Don’t have one. Where’s the hose?”
“I’d help you out, but Tom Ehrlich needs his rig.”
“Hose?” Merritt had learned long ago that a soft voice is scarier than loud.
“Sure, Jon. There, outside. You want soap and polish? You give me a day, I’ll have her like new.”
“Keys.”
Merritt took the offered chain.
When the Ford was clean enough so as not to draw attention, he fired up the engine. It knocked but was no knockier than it had been a year ago.
He sped into the street and cruised for fifteen minutes, pulling to the curb near an electronics store. Inside he bought a burner phone. Getting one set up wasn’t as easy as it seemed in the movies. He knew this from his prior life. Yes, you could buy one without a credit card or a real address. But an email was necessary. The clerk, a beefy kid with impressive, meaningless tats, helped him out, and they got the thing activated.
Sitting in the driver’s seat, he stared at the phone for a long time. He placed a call. He heard three ascending tones, then the announcement that the number was no longer in service.
Not surprising, considering that the woman whose number it once had been was his ex-wife, the complaining witness — that is, victim — in the case that led to his arrest for attempted murder and assault with a deadly, resulting in, as the indictment reported with a drama you didn’t expect in legal pleadings, “grievous bodily harm.”
6
As he approached Harmon Energy Products’ campus, Colter Shaw looked back at the riverwalk.
No sign of Abe Lincoln.
A dark gray Mercedes Metris was approaching. The van pulled to the curb and out climbed a slim man in a black jacket, collar turned up, and black slacks. The outfit had many pockets, as tactical attire often did. The man was of a skin shade only slightly lighter than the clothing and his head was shaved. His wing-tip shoes were polished to dark mirrors.
Shaw stopped and nodded to Lenny Caster, the private eye who’d helped with the trap.
“Lenny.”
“Colter. Went okay?”
“Aside from my visitor.”
Caster had been tailing Shaw from the factory in case the three men had learned of the switch and returned for him.
We’re not alone...
Shaw continued, “Could you make him?”
Caster nodded. “Got some good pictures. Sent them to Mack.”
The woman had some excellent facial recognition experts she could call on.
The man pulled out his phone. He read from the text: “ ‘Sergei Lemerov. Former GRU.’ ”
Russian military intelligence.
“In the country on a B-1 temporary. Kicked out of Germany for dirty tricks ops. Believed to have been involved in the assassination of an oligarch in London and an activist in Belarus.”
He looked up. “Couldn’t find his travel particulars. Maybe private, maybe government.”
Shaw said, “His best was two hundred K.”
“Peanuts,” said Caster.
Government shenanigans came with shoestring budgets. With any commercial competitor wishing to buy the stolen S.I.T., $200K would have been a starting point.
“Mack said she’ll try to keep track of him. Anything she finds she’ll send directly to you and Marty.”
“I’ll brief him. Our trio?” A nod back to the factory.
He called up an app on his phone. “The Saudis’re going north on Fifty-five. Probably to Granton Exec airport. They’ll have a G7 or something overseas fueled up. LeClaire started for home, then turned south. He’s on the beltway now.” Caster had put GPS trackers in the wheel wells of the men’s cars.
The men shook hands. “Good working with you, Lenny. You ever get out of town? Could use some help from time to time.”
Caster said, “I stay close to home. Born and bred here. Coach my son’s basketball and daughter’s soccer. But, for a day or two? I could swing it. And I have a feeling whatever you’d have going on, it’d be... interesting. Keep me in mind.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Oh, and by the by? Mack said the oligarch and the activist that Lemerov killed? They were poisoned with polonium. That’s not a fun way to go. Until you’re well out of town, Colter, I wouldn’t drink anything that doesn’t come in a bottle that you don’t open yourself.”
7
Jon Merritt was leaving the Trevor County Medical Services building, following his appointment.
A nondescript place in a nondescript part of Ferrington.
The building needed a peel and scrub. It could have been a slightly better-off cousin of the prison, only ringed by chain-link, not razor wire.
The building was home to maybe forty physicians of many different specialties. You could get treated for every ailment under the sun, from cloudy eyes to painful guts to broken bones to wrinkles, if you considered wrinkles an ailment.
He glanced at the list of offices and he noted one of the larger signs.
He was thinking of a particular physician he’d been seeing recently. Recalling their first session.
The frumpy doctor, about forty, is in a brown suit. No tie. That must be in a manual somewhere. Strangulation risk. His shoes are laceless slip-ons. His hair is similar to his patient’s — that is, blondish and not abundant, to put it kindly.
There is a smell about him. Merritt can’t quite place it. In his chair, across from Merritt’s, Dr. Evans sits forward. He has explained that he will always remain outside Merritt’s “sphere of personness.”
This is a psychological thing, it seems, intended to demonstrate that the physician is attentive to the patient but doesn’t make him uncomfortable.
Sphere of personness...
Merritt would simply say “his space.” But then, he doesn’t have the medical degree.
The distance between the two is also a security measure, considering what many of Dr. Evans’s patients are here for.
Murder.
Attempted murder.
Grievous bodily harm...
The room bears little resemblance to a traditional therapist’s digs. No couch, no armchair, no box of Kleenex, no diplomas, no framed pictures or posters carefully picked to cause the patients no offense.
The doctor is jotting notes on a tablet, not with a pen or pencil. Apparently there was an incident a few years ago — though, luckily, the ER doc up the hall managed to save one of the psychiatrist’s eyes.
A wireless panic button sits on the table next to Dr. Evans’s chair. It’s not red. Merritt has wondered how many demons descend if the doc pushes it.
Has he ever?
“Let’s just chat, shall we, Jon?” The man is only half here. Distracted.
And what is that smell?
Merritt is all smiles and cooperation. “Sure, I guess. About what?”
“Anything that comes to mind. How you’re feeling about being here.”
Did he really ask that?
But again the smile.
“Your childhood.”
“Oh, sure.”
Just wanting the minutes to go by quickly, he begins to ramble about growing up in Ferrington. Telling stories good and stories bad and stories traumatic and stories affirming. Some are even true.
He’s careful about what he says, though. Dr. Evans, of the curious scent, may be sharper than he seems and is looking for tells, like a carny mind reader, that will lead him to a secret about Jon Merritt that Jon Merritt does not want him to know.
Merritt thinks of the secret simply as the “Truth” about him. With a capital T.
As he talks, staying far, far from the Truth, he notices that the doctor’s gaze strays around the room, often ending up on the window. The thick glass opens onto the yard. But it’s a prison; there is no view.
Merritt wonders if the doctor’s inattention is due to the fact that he is wrestling obsessively with diagnoses and treatment plans in order to cure his prisoner-patients.
Or if the man doesn’t give a shit about them and is daydreaming of hearing out housewives from the Garden District, who might be depressed or tightly wound, but never sociopathic and homicidal.
Jon Merritt now left the medical center behind and moved through the parking lot in a taut lope. He was six foot two inches but tended to walk stooped over, which made him appear to be a predatory animal. He climbed into his big Ford and in twenty minutes he was slicing through a commercial row south of downtown.
This was a neighborhood familiar to him. He’d spent plenty of hours on these streets. Here you could get the nails tipping your fingers and toes polished to gems, your car repaired, your hair extended, your baldness covered. You could buy electronics, toys, sundries, pay-as-you-go phones, used furniture, appliances big and appliances small, all off-brand and cheap and with short life spans.
You could also rent a girl or boy or combination of both for an hour or two, transactions that Merritt was also familiar with.
He cruised up the street toward the Kenoah until he came to the River View Motel. Ferrington spawned lodgings like this — one-story structures of pastel shades, well overdue for new paint, some bulbs of the neon signage dark, the parking lots weedy. The vending machines were bulletproof.
The motel did have what the name promised — a few rooms at least and the lobby looked onto a patchy city park that descended to the water. The appeal, though, was another matter and depended largely on whether or not you had a sense of smell.
Merritt checked in, left his belongings in the dim box of a room, closed the curtains and turned on the TV, suggesting occupancy. He stepped outside, hung the do not disturb sign on the knob and walked to a convenience store he’d passed on the drive here. He picked up some toiletries, two Italian subs, some soda, some barbecue chips.
Then on to the most important destination: the ABC store.
He walked into the place, which, like all liquor stores he’d ever been in — and that was many, many — was filled with a sweet aroma. Was that from the occasional broken bottle? Or maybe something about the paste used to affix the labels to the bottles? The cartons possibly.
Merritt’s gut did a happy twist when he smelled that smell and saw the rows and rows of bottles.
His friends.
It was Bulleit bourbon he selected, a fifth. The clerk, a skinny man of indeterminate race, seemed briefly surprised. In this neighborhood, most purchases would be what the bulk of the inventory consisted of: pints, half-pints and miniatures. Also, it would’ve been months since anyone had shelled out for a premium like this.
The last time he’d drunk any Bulleit was the day of his sentencing. His lawyer had not been pleased he’d shown up in court drunk. Nor had the judge.
On the way back to the motel, he was distracted by motion to his left. He paused to watch a long barge, faded green, rusty, being pushed west by a mule of a tug. It was loaded with shipping containers, baby-blue Maersks being the most common. Ferrington was now only a blip, a mile marker on the trip to and from points east and points west. Once, the town had received dozens of vessels a day, workers emptying them of certain types of cargo and loading them with others. Mostly it was iron ingots arriving and finished metal products leaving. The name of the town itself, every schoolchild here had learned, came from the atomic symbol for iron, Fe.
The barge plowed out of sight and Merritt returned to his room. He chained the door and wedged a chair under the knob. This was a notoriously popular break-in locale. He got the AC running. He set his deli purchases and the bourbon on the bedside table. He rolled onto the bed and ate his late lunch hungrily, alternating bites and gulps.
Leaning back, eyes closed, he felt his gut churn.
Maybe not a good idea, packing in the food and drink.
The sensation, which had been building, struck.
Merritt rose fast and walked into the john, where, dropping to his knees, he puked aggressively.
Rinsing his mouth, he walked back to bed, lying flat this time. After some moments he sat up and pulled the backpack close and extracted the envelopes the guard had given him.
One was the discharge order itself. Nothing of interest. Lots of “don’ts” and legalese. He opened the second envelope and withdrew four sheets of paper, stapled together. He read them carefully and slipped them back into the envelope, which he returned to the backpack.
Jon Merritt drained his glass, did the suggesting-occupancy trick again and stepped outside, making sure the door locked properly. He pulled his phone from his pocket and placed a call, surprised that he still remembered the number.
8
Four days earlier...
“I have a problem. A serious one. I need help.”
The man was short and broad, his hair brown and curly. He wore a tie-less blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled, and tan slacks. A checkered sport coat, black and white, was hung, without hanger, on a hook behind the door of the office that he and Colter Shaw sat in. His shoes were bright orange sneakers.
In the few minutes Shaw had known him, fortyish Marty Harmon had proved to be cherubic, edgy and focused as a laser gunsight, shifting seamlessly from one mode to another.
They faced each other across a battered, file-covered desk.
“You’re like a private eye?”
Shaw told him about his reward business.
Harmon offered an interested grunt. “Never heard of that.”
Colter Shaw in fact was here not in the role as a practitioner of that trade, but to consider taking on a for-hire job. A friend — Tom Pepper, a former FBI agent — had called him, explaining that the assistant special agent in charge of a Midwestern field office hadn’t been able to take on a case. Pepper had asked, was he interested?
With no good reward jobs beckoning, Shaw had thought, why not?
Harmon now rose and walked to a whiteboard. Began drawing. “First, background.”
The lecture began and Shaw listened with interest. He was learning about something he had not previously known: that there was such a thing as miniature nuclear power plants.
They were officially known as SMRs, or “small modular reactors.”
The adjective was a bit misleading, as the average SMR weighed in at about sixty tons, it seemed. Still, they were prefabricated and could be shipped intact to their destinations, making them essentially portable.
Harmon Energy Products’ version was known by the clever trade name the Pocket Sun.
In bold strokes he continued his artwork. Shaw gathered it was a cross section of one of these.
He was in an armchair that had seen better days. The springs were shot and the leather was cracked and worn where elbows and butts would wear. There was a couch too, half covered with papers and objects — metal parts, wires, solid-state boards. This was not the glitzy office of a Silicon Valley start-up, but the functional operating suite of a hardworking businessman heading up a no-nonsense Midwestern manufacturing company.
The only decorations here were a picture of the man and his dark-haired wife in her mid-forties and a large posted periodic table of the elements. On the bottom row one of these substances had been enclosed by a bright red drawing of a heart. It was the letter U.
Uranium.
The poster had been signed by scores of people, presumably employees. It would mark some significant event in the company’s history.
There were no diplomas or certificates or industry awards on the walls, which might offer a glimpse into the CEO’s bio. Shaw had, though, had his PI run a basic backgrounder. Harmon had an engineering degree from a lower state university and had founded, run and sold several other companies — of the low-tech sort. Energy, mostly. Some infrastructure. He steered clear of the press, once telling a reporter he didn’t have time for that “stuff,” appending a harsh modifier to the word. Still, Mack found a few articles, which depicted him as a workaholic and an uncompromising innovator and businessman. He himself owned a dozen patents for engineering devices, whose purposes Shaw could not figure out from Mack’s report.
As he drew on the board, Harmon continued his TED Talk. “So, Mr. Shaw, imagine! With our SMRs, developing countries can have dependable refrigeration, lighting, phones... And computers! The internet. Healthcare. There’re some sub-Saharan people’re living in the nineteenth century, and Pocket Suns can bring them into the modern era. Prejudice and idiotic ideas — about race, AIDS, Covid, STDs — only exist in the vacuum of ignorance. Give people energy, and they’ll have not only lighting, but enlightenment.”
A line from a sales pitch, but not a bad one.
“Now,” Harmon said, turning away from the board. “To the problem. There’s a little-talked-about concern in the nuclear energy world: that someone’ll steal nuclear fuel and weaponize it. It’s known as ‘proliferation.’ Pretty sanitized term, no?”
Because SMRs like Pocket Suns were often installed in countries with fewer safeguards and security staff, there was a risk someone would strip out the fuel or even steal the unit as a whole.
The nuclear material in the Pocket Suns was the same as in most reactors — U-235, enriched to around five percent, the level that met government approval. Harmon said, “To make a bomb with that kind of enrichment, you’d need the amount of fuel roughly the size of a full-grown elephant. But if you enrich to forty-five percent, then all you’d need is thirty-six kilos to make a bomb. That’s the size of a German shepherd.
“See this.” After scratching his upturned nose, he indicated his diagram, which looked like a bell jar, inside of which were clusters of thin vertical pipes. At the bottom of each was a small box. It was to one of these that he now pointed. “This’s the S.I.T., or ‘security intervention trigger.’ My most brilliant engineer came up with the idea. If someone moves a Pocket Sun without authorization or tries to break into the fuel compartment, the S.I.T. blows the uranium pellets into dust and floods them with a substance I’ve invented, a mesoporous nano material. It binds with the uranium and makes it useless in weapons. No other SMR manufacturer has anything like it.”
The cherub suddenly vanished; his other side — the angry side — emerged.
He leaned slightly forward and pointed a blunt finger for emphasis. “We do spot inventories. A few days ago the auditors found components’d gone missing, along with some mesoporous material. Somebody here is making an S.I.T. He’s — or she’s — going to sell it to a competitor. They have to be stopped. Agent Pepper said this’s the sort of thing you could do. Twenty thousand if you catch him and recover the trigger, Mr. Shaw. I’ll pay expenses too.”
Shaw considered what he was hearing. “You think it’s going overseas. If it were a U.S. competitor you could just sue for theft of trade secrets and patent infringement. Get a good lawyer and you could probably close them down.”
For a time, after college, Shaw had worked in a law office in California. He liked the challenge of the law, though he decided that however mentally stimulating the profession was, office jobs were a poor fit for someone known as the Restless Man.
Harmon said, “Exactly right. I know my competitors in the States. It’s not them. Look, we’re a small company, running on fumes. The S.I.T. is one of the few things that differentiates us. It’s a huge selling point. Somebody else gets it, undercuts our price, we’re gone. And I’m the only manufacturer who’s planning installs in the Third World. And, okay, let’s be grown-ups. I want to make some change myself. Too many people apologizing for capitalism. Bullshit. I make profits, I sink them into the next big thing, employing workers, making products that people...” He stopped himself and waved his hand, as if swatting away a hovering lecture.
“Tom Pepper told me the local FBI can’t handle it.”
A grimace. “Backlogged. And the Ferrington PD? They’ve cut staff by fifty percent. I even said I’d contribute a shitload to the benevolent fund. But they can’t keep up with drugs, homicides and domestics. A missing gadget’s not even on their radar.”
Shaw said, “I’ll take the job.”
The man strode forward and, though diminutive, delivered a powerful handshake.
Harmon returned to his desk and made two brief calls, summoning people.
No more than five seconds passed before his door opened and a tall woman walked inside. Her long black hair was tied back with a blue scarf, which matched the shade of her studious eyeglasses. High cheekbones, generous lips. She wore a tailored suit. Shaw wondered if she’d been a fashion model.
Harmon introduced Shaw to his assistant, Marianne Keller. “Mr. Shaw’s going to be helping us with the trigger.”
“Ah, good, Marty.” Her face bloomed with relief. Shaw supposed that a company like this fostered a sense of family. A betrayal stung them all.
“Anything he needs for expenses, carte blanche.” Then he frowned. “Okay with no private jets?”
“Off the table,” Shaw assured him.
“Yessir,” Keller said. Shaw handed her a card containing only his name and current burner phone number. And he took down her direct line on the back of another.
As she left, someone else entered. As tall as Keller, this woman was blond, hair braided carefully and affixed behind her head. She too had an alluring face. Her build was athletic, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she ran marathons.
Sonja Nilsson, it seemed, was head of Harmon Energy security.
“Mr. Shaw,” she said, also shaking his hand firmly. “Good to meet you.”
He expected an accent and he got one, though it placed her not in Stockholm but within a hundred miles of Birmingham, Alabama.
“Colter,” he said.
Nilsson offered, “Marty told me he was talking to you. I looked you up. Rewards for a living?”
“Like a private eye who doesn’t bill unless he delivers.”
She sat perfectly upright and moved her hands and arms economically. She held a tablet but didn’t fiddle with it. She wore a complex analog watch and no jewelry other than a ring on the index finger of her right hand. It seemed to be a serpent. He couldn’t tell for certain. Shaw made another deduction: she was a veteran. And that she’d seen combat. The eyes — a rare green shade — were completely calm.
Nilsson said, “I’ve gone as far as I can, looking for the thief. Nothing. We need a fresh take.”
Shaw now opened a notebook, 5 by 7 inches. From his jacket he removed his fountain pen, a Delta Titanio Galassia, black with three orange rings toward the nib. He knew some might think in this day and age using an instrument like this was pretentious. But Shaw took lengthy notes during the course of his rewards jobs, and a fine pen like this — it was not inexpensive — was kinder to his hand than ballpoints. It was also simply a pleasure to write with.
As she described what had happened in detail, he jotted notes in his perfect handwriting, the lines horizontal on the unruled paper. This was a skill that had not been taught to him but simply passed down from his father. Both were calligraphers and artists.
When he felt he had enough to get started, he said, “I want to see employees’ RFID log-ins and log-outs. And security tapes.”
Nilsson said, “I’ve already pulled that together.”
They rose and shook hands once again, Shaw nodding away the effusive thanks and hoping a businessman’s hug would not be forthcoming.
9
Sonja Nilsson’s office, curiously, was bigger and contained better furniture than her CEO’s. Good art on the walls too. Landscape photos mostly. He wondered if she’d shot them herself.
They sat on a couch before a long glass coffee table, on which were neat stacks of manila file folders.
Together, they reviewed employee records and the data from digital key entry and exit points, Shaw taking occasional notes. She lifted a seventeen-inch laptop onto the files, booted it up and logged on with both fingerprint and password. On this she called up surveillance tapes of the corridors where the S.I.T. components had been stored. Even though they fast-forwarded the tapes, this took a solid hour.
When they’d finished, Shaw said, “Again.”
It was halfway through the second viewing that Shaw spotted the fly.
He scrubbed back and examined the scene again.
“Look.”
He pointed to a video of the corridor leading to the facility where the S.I.T. components were stored. No one was seen entering or leaving the place between the closing time of 5:30 and the start of business at 8:00 the next morning.
He froze a frame and pointed to the insect on the wall.
“Okay. Got the little critter,” she drawled.
“Now look at the next day.”
He ran that tape to the time he recalled.
The same fly landed in the same place.
“Well, damn.” The latter word was two syllables.
Somebody had gotten to the security videos and replaced them with one downloaded earlier. For two evenings, the thief would have had unobserved access to the storage facility.
Whoever did that had tech skills and Shaw was sure the thief had erased entry logs into the burgled offices. They also would have altered RFID information about entering and leaving the building itself.
“That’s hard hacking,” Shaw said. “Let’s focus on your IT people.”
Shaw came up with an idea for an undercover op. Marianne Keller arranged interviews between those in IT and an outside consultant hired by Harmon to consider opening an IT facility on the West Coast. For the gig, Shaw — in the role of Carter Stone — had donned the one business suit hanging in his Winnebago and a pair of glasses with non-magnifying lenses.
“I look corporate enough?” he asked Nilsson.
She replied, “Middle manager all the way.”
He sat in a bare office, yellow pad before him, and the employees filed in one by one. Shaw didn’t begin the discussion with the corporate move but let his purpose hang vaguely over them for five or so minutes as he asked about their career history at the company, where they’d worked before, if they had any complaints. Only when he sensed suspicion rising did he mention the move. He jotted their response, thanked them and then called in the next employee.
All the while he’d been gauging each man’s or woman’s reaction.
One was notably uncomfortable, his body language easy to read: guilt and worry. Shaw put him at ease right away, shifting to the relocation story. Paul LeClaire soon relaxed. Shaw stayed true to the role and, with a good businessman smile and a good businessman handshake, sent him off.
He called Nilsson. “We’ve got him. Now we need to find the trigger.”
She said, “Surveillance.”
“Right.”
Over the next couple of days they tailed LeClaire and listened to his public conversations and read his emails, as his employment contract allowed. The phone was issued by the company, but while they could geotrack it, they could not eavesdrop.
Shaw and Nilsson followed him to meetings with two men at a motel outside of town. Using a Big Ear microphone they picked up the men’s names: Ahmad and Rass, Saudi businessmen, brokers in the energy field. They learned too about the handover time and location: an abandoned factory on the Kenoah River.
Sonja Nilsson and he had taken their findings to Harmon, who was as dismayed as he was angry. “Paul? Really? We’ve been nothing but generous to him... Damn. Well, we’ve got a name, and you’ve got evidence. Now the FBI and police have to get involved.”
“Are you sure you want that?” Shaw had asked.
“What do you mean?”
Nilsson said, “Colter and I were talking.”
Shaw took over and offered the plan. “I think we should swap out the real S.I.T. for a fake one with a GPS chip in it.”
Nilsson added, “We let the exchange happen, then track the fake S.I.T. and find out who the buyer ultimately is.”
Harmon’s eyes had narrowed as he considered this — the sniper-focused mode. “Good. Put it together. I want his goddamn head.”
Shaw rose and stepped toward the door, trying to remember the formula for battlefield smoke.
10
Present day
“We had another bidder.”
It was a half hour after he’d left Lenny Caster, following the encounter with Lemerov, aka Abe Lincoln. Shaw was once again with Marty Harmon in the man’s modest office.
They were sitting in front of the cluttered coffee table. The Swedish Alabaman security head, Sonja Nilsson, was here as well. Today in a silver jacket, black skirt, white blouse, small pearls.
The elfin man rubbed his frizzy hair and frowned. “Go on, Colter.”
“A Russian.” He explained about the attempted preemptive offer.
“How did he find you?” Nilsson asked.
“He was running surveillance too.” Shaw then told them what Lenny and Mack had discovered about the man.
Nilsson said, “GRU? Soviet apparatus... He could surface again. Phoenix from the ashes. They do that.”
Shaw said, “He got rebuffed. If he’s freelance, he might move on. If he’s on payroll, the failure won’t sit well with his bosses. That means he’ll try again.”
Nilsson nodded. Her blond tresses were down, cascading over her shoulders and ending in a severe cut about twelve inches below the nape. Shaw had noticed that her nostrils had flared slightly when she’d joined them. She knew about the camo smoke he’d concocted but now her face registered familiarity with the scent, which supported his deduction about her time in the military.
Shaw glanced at the S.I.T. “Check it. We need to make sure it’s real.”
“You mean the prick might be a double agent or something? Selling the Saudis a fake? And then the real one to someone else?”
Nilsson lifted an eyebrow. “Foolish. But he’s got those debts. The gambling.”
Harmon rose and walked to his desk. Among the clutter he found an electric screwdriver and undid the dozen tiny Phillips-head screws and removed the housing. He examined the guts. “It’s real.” The CEO set the unit aside.
He asked how Shaw would like the check made out and Shaw said to himself. Harmon wrote it, tore it from the book and handed it to him. “You should get yourself a corporation. Limited liability. You know, legally, a good idea.”
He believed he had one. He’d have to find out. Shaw took the check, stashed it in his wallet, next to another one he’d received for a reward job from a month ago. He’d forgotten to deposit it.
Shaw glanced Nilsson’s way. And what was with those eyes? So intensely green. Contact lenses? He’d been trying to decide.
“Now. LeClaire. What do we do? Call the prosecutor? Write out affidavits? And I want a civil suit too. Let’s break him.”
But Shaw said, “Might have a better idea. You have a payroll office here?”
“We do,” Harmon said.
“I need a thousand singles and four hundred-dollar bills. Temporarily.”
“Done. What for?” With a nose scratch, Harmon leaned in. His cherubic look gave way to the focused one.
“I’m going to find LeClaire and offer to buy the S.I.T. back. I’ll flash what looks like a hundred K.”
Harmon said, “But it’s already on that private jet. Halfway to Mexico or the Caribbean by now.”
Nilsson, though, was smiling. She got it. “Ah, but that’ll convince him and his buyers that it’s the real item. Maybe there was some splinter of doubt that Colter swapped it out when the smoke bomb went off.”
“What if LeClaire accepts?”
“He won’t.” Shaw and Nilsson said this simultaneously.
Harmon muttered, “And then jail?”
Nilsson said, “I don’t think we want a trial, Marty. Details of the technology’ll come out.”
Shaw said, “Trade secrets aren’t very secret once you get into court.”
Nilsson said, “And let’s not telegraph to customers we had a security breach.”
“I suppose,” he griped. This remedy clearly went against Harmon’s take-no-prisoners philosophy.
Shaw said, “Fire him. And then don’t do anything. He’ll keep waiting for the police to come knocking. Every time he hears a siren or sees a dark sedan parked nearby he’ll have a very bad day.”
This was a good second-place alternative and Harmon was laughing. “Love it! The other-shoe punishment!” He turned to Nilsson. “Why don’t we hire Colter? Put him on our security staff?”
She looked Shaw’s way with a smile. “I wouldn’t mind that.” A brief pause. “But I don’t think it’s the sort of job that would appeal.”
“Not for me.”
“What? You don’t love our beautiful burg?” Harmon glanced out the window at the dun cityscape. The river, its shade yellowish-gray from this angle, was prominent. Disintegrating cardboard boxes, driftwood, trash and dead fish floated downstream.
His face once again grew dark. “Yesterday? Another half dozen in the hospital, half of them kids.”
Shaw said, “How’s the cleanup coming?”
Harmon scoffed. “Slow, slow, slow... The city and county’re bankrupt. We have to go begging to the state and feds for help. Prying money out of their hands takes forever.”
Nilsson said, “And what is allocated to the cleanup? A lot’s unaccounted for. Millions are missing. And who knows where it went. Contractors, city councilmen, the state capital? Washington?”
Her boss said, “A reporter for a local TV station was investigating and...” He shook his head. “Died in a car crash. I’d do air quotes but I don’t do air quotes.”
“Contract hit?”
“Who knows. Probably. There wasn’t much of an investigation, I heard.” A sour laugh. “Ferrington had a lovely tradition of corruption even before the water issue.”
Nilsson said, “If it doesn’t get cleaned up soon Marty’s going to lose his shirt.”
Harmon, it seemed, was distributing free water to those in the affected part of Ferrington, which was a wide swath of the city.
He made a call on the intercom and a moment later his willowy assistant, Marianne Keller, appeared. “Yes, Marty?”
“Authorize disbursement of cash. Colter and Sonja’ll tell you the amount and denominations.”
“I’ll get the paperwork.” Her eyes took in the trigger and they glowed. “You got it back.”
Family...
“Mr. Shaw pulled a switcheroo...”
She smiled his way.
Harmon and Shaw shook hands, and this time the CEO did come in for a bear hug. He stepped back and frowned. “You really should think about that job offer. Good pay. Pension plan. And all the bottled water you can drink.”
11
The round man, in a navy suit and open shirt, was evenly tanned, a healthy color. His thick, swept-back hair was a shade that nestled between red and blond.
He looked up from his lunch, which was meatloaf or chopped steak, sitting on a solid white plate decorated with blue stripes, concentric, near the rim.
Eyeing Merritt carefully, he said, “Ah, Jon. Sit. Sit down.”
Merritt joined Dominic Ryan at the chrome-trimmed table in a dim corner of the Ferrington City Diner off Manufacturers Row. He looked around the large, dark breezy room. The walls, painted green, bore faded murals of muscled, thick-legged and broad-necked laborers, wearing overalls and fedoras, en route to their jobs.
The diner had been a popular feeding trough for working people when there were working people in this part of town. Then, it had been packed and noisy and boisterous. Men (and only men) in suits and men in overalls talked and gestured and laughed and argued and ate piled-high plates of food before heading back to the office or floor.
Now there were exactly four people inside, in addition to Ryan and Merritt. One was a large man in jeans and a black leather jacket, sitting with his back to the wall. A magazine was before him, but his eyes had been on Merritt as he entered. He now returned to the periodical.
Ryan sent a glance across the room and a waitress walked up to them. She asked, “Can I get you anything?”
“Coffee. Black.”
“Anything else? We got specials.”
“No.”
When she was gone Ryan said, “You okay, Jon?” The brown eyes scanned him closely.
Merritt muttered, “You know County. No sun in the yard. Food’s crap. Who wants to eat?” He absently tapped the inside pocket of his windbreaker, where sat the envelope containing ten thousand dollars he’d just withdrawn from a nearby branch of his bank. It was over the IRS reporting limit, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t a terrorist and he wasn’t a money launderer. Those weren’t things he’d been convicted for. There was more if he needed it. As part of the divorce, his ex had agreed to split their savings account. He wasn’t surprised all the money was there. She was perfectly capable of screwing him but not that way.
A nod of thanks to the waitress as she set down the cup. He took it and sipped. Didn’t really want any. But he was testing his gut. After a moment he concluded: no, it wasn’t going to come up again. He added sugar. Another test. Same result.
Ryan had more of his meal, cutting it with his fork. “I eat meat at lunch. At home, at night, June watches the fat.” He tapped his gut. Round, yes, but Merritt wouldn’t’ve worried about it. “Sometimes it’s just a salad. For dinner. You can believe it? And dressing? Low fat.”
Ryan glanced Merritt’s way, subtly. The rambling meant he was treading lightly. He’d seen Merritt out of control. Blood had spilled.
And this caution was coming from one of the most ruthless mob bosses in Ferrington’s history.
The man’s freckled face concentrated on the plate over the course of several bites, washed down with sips from his half-empty pint glass. Bass ale, Merritt could tell from the aroma.
He looked off again and he was not wholly present. He was thinking of — no, was seeing — the words he’d just read on the last sheet in the second envelope Larkin, the big guard, had given him: letters addressed to the discharge board. Three recommended his release. The last one did not.
My ex-husband is a brutal and sadistic man. Throughout the marriage I was constantly in fear for my and my daughter’s physical safety and emotional health. Our daughter has been in therapy for years. Only through regularly meeting with a psychologist is she able to cope with the trauma she has experienced throughout her life thanks to my husband — thankfully now “ex.”
He puts on a charming façade. Do NOT let him fool you. My therapist said he is a classic sociopath. Friendly when he wants to be, but cruel underneath.
But three to one.
And he was free.
After a couple more bites, Ryan brought him back. “Jon?”
“You ever come here as a kid?”
“Here? Sure. You?”
Merritt didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “With my old man, ten, twelve times.” He was staring at the mural. “Lunch break. He was at Briscow.”
“The tool place?”
A nod.
Those lunches were at a time when Jon was the star on the high school baseball team. He hadn’t wanted to come, never knew what his father might do or say, even in public: bully and insult. But the man had insisted, and if Jon had said no, things definitely would’ve been bad. So he rolled the dice and went. Usually it was okay. A little bullying, a little sarcasm. Not terrible.
When offers from the pro teams, even bush league, never materialized, the lunch invitations from his father stopped. And he didn’t have to worry about it anymore.
Merritt sipped coffee. The waitress came by and refilled the cup. He waited until she was across the room, then eased close to the Irishman. “I need two things, Dom.”
“If I can help you out.” Given who Merritt was, this qualification was required. But appended delicately, so as not to light any fuses.
“A piece. Not fancy. Wheel gun’s fine.”
Ryan didn’t ask if he was sure. Everybody knew that for a con who’d just been released, possession of a firearm was suicide: the fastest way to get processed back inside — the fastest way, short of using it, of course.
“When?”
“Now.”
Ryan’s brow furrowed. He nodded to himself and sent a text. The response was nearly instantaneous. “Twenty minutes. Out back. Expect a frisk for a wire. It’ll be energetic.”
“Fine.”
“And the second thing?” Ryan asked.
Merritt was seeing more of his ex’s letter. The last paragraph, in particular.
There are things about Jon that I know, that he does not want to come to light. This was, I’m sure, one of the reasons for his attempt to kill me. I had hoped to be able to relocate with my daughter before he was released, as I know our lives are still in danger. A release now would not give me the chance to finish important projects at work and move.
Please, honor the terms of the plea arrangement, and keep him in prison for the entire time of his sentence.
Respectfully,
Allison Parker
Just below her name were two thick black lines of redaction. The redactor, however, had done a fast job of it. Holding the letter up to the light, you could just make out a street address. It would be her new house, whose location she would have gone to great lengths to keep secret from him.
“The second thing...” Merritt was leaning closer yet. “Special services.”
Ryan had a parcel of pink meat halfway to his mouth. The fork returned to the plate, fully loaded.
In the shadowy world of these two men, the phrase didn’t mean elite military units, or concierge treatment of VIP guests in posh hotels. The “services” referred to all things involving for-hire murder — from tracking down the target, to turning the living into the dead, to disposing of the resulting work product in clever ways so that the body was never found. Which was, Jon Merritt knew very well, a task far more difficult than, at first blush, it seemed.
12
Wearing a yellow plastic apron, the man stood in the middle of his workshop.
He’d pulled the latex gloves off to read the text he’d just received. Now he slipped the phone away and eyed the end table.
It was a functional piece, no particular era, about two by two feet, thirty inches high, the beaded trim around the top being the only fillip.
“Dawndue...” came the sound from his thin lips, the fabricated word a habit, an affectation. He uttered it the way someone might whistle or hum. He was often unaware of doing this. One woman he dated had asked if he was a bird-watcher and the sound was that of a dove.
Moll Frain was a big man, with broad shoulders and a thick neck. He was, in effect, a column. A slim paintbrush looked silly in his blunt hands. His face was pocked but not extensively. Sometimes you couldn’t even see it. He was today in what he wore frequently: black dress slacks and a white shirt, both of which the smock protected from paint.
Moll was a native Ferringtonian, born here, the son of laborers in one of the ironworks, father on the line, mother in bookkeeping.
He was infinitely grateful that he’d found within him some talent that sent him on a different career path from that of his parents.
Eyeing the table again.
The temptation was to continue, enhance some more. And more after that. But he’d learned to resist. Once you were done, you were done, and — in your heart — you knew it.
The table was made of machine-cut pine, but now, in its transformed state, it was something more: the legs were white marble, streaked with veins of black. The top appeared to be copper aged to green.
Such was the magic of faux finishing. Turning something into what it was not. The large, airy workshop behind his modest house contained fifteen pieces, some drying, some dry. Others were in their dull mass-marketed state, awaiting his magic touch.
Moll’s favorite was a chair sitting near the wall. It was constructed of aluminum. He’d painted it to resemble wood. He liked the irony. This piece he would never sell.
He washed his brushes in turpentine — he used only righteous oil paints, not acrylic — and sealed the cans tight with a rubber mallet.
He hung the smock on a hook, then returned to his living room. He pulled on a suit jacket and knotted a deep blue tie around his neck. He looked at his watch. It was time to go.
Come on, man. Come on.
Glancing past the timepiece at his wrist, he examined his ruddy skin. It was worse. He was having an allergic reaction to something — his arms, neck, legs and chest were red and burned and itched. He hadn’t noticed the condition right away because he was an outdoorsman and had a late-season sunburn. But this was something different. It was spreading.
The decor of his bungalow was pale green, the same shade as the exterior siding. The color in here was more vibrant; the windows were curtained and no sun intruded. The outside clapboard was bleached pale. While he produced a piece of furniture or picture frame once a week or so, he had yet to paint the exterior of his dwelling.
The place felt empty today.
He was thinking, as he often had recently, that at this age, forty-three, he should settle down, be serious about it, get a woman.
That’s what his mother had written him in emails... while she still knew what a computer was.
And what writing was.
Settle down...
Well, he wasn’t that old. Not nowadays. He’d get it worked out.
“Dawndue,” came the quiet birdcall. He sprayed Benadryl on the rash on his left arm.
The doorbell rang.
“Open!”
Desmond Sawicki walked inside, slight and skinny as Moll was large and thick. Another difference between them: Moll always wore a suit, while his occasional partner preferred casual. Today, a tan windbreaker like a golfer might wear on a cool spring day, dark slacks. They both had abundant hair. Moll’s was brown, Desmond’s dirty blond and longish and slicked back with lotion. Hand cream, Moll believed. The thirty-eight-year-old might have been an aging surfer, if Ferrington had not been a thousand miles from the nearest wave.
“You alone?” Desmond asked, looking around.
“I am.”
Desmond seemed to want more but Moll did not accommodate.
“Where you been?” Moll asked. A gloss of irritation. “We’re late.”
“Had to finish something.”
Probably involved a woman. Desmond had this habit.
“Any food?” He walked into the kitchen.
“No time. The job. Got to move.”
“Coffee at least?”
“To go.”
Desmond returned, sipping brew as beige as his jacket. Moll smelled cigarette. He himself had never smoked but he’d heard it was very addictive.
“What is with that?” Desmond said, eyeing the man’s red skin. “It’s still there.”
“It will get looked at.” He didn’t want to talk about the crimson flesh either.
They walked out the door to Moll’s Ford Transit, as convenient a vehicle as Detroit had ever created.
As they climbed inside he noticed Desmond was frowning, thoughtful. He was muttering, “I don’t know.”
Was he troubled about today’s job?
Desmond was fine killing a meth cooker, an Oxy dealer, a whistleblower, a witness about to turn evidence — those were all in a day’s work. But Moll wasn’t sure if he had ever killed an innocent female. Was this going to be a problem? He had to find out. Right up front.
“So. What’s with the mope?” Moll asked.
“I don’t know,” the man repeated and gave a shrug. “Afterward, fried chicken? Or Chinese? I just can’t decide.”
Moll considered. “Barbecue. That new rib place on Castle Drive.”
Desmond brightened considerably. “Oh, yeah. Good call.”
13
“There.”
Colter Shaw nodded out the window of Nilsson’s burgundy Range Rover. He was indicating Coz-EE-Suites, a pleasant-enough motel on the outskirts of Ferrington.
The tracker that Lenny Caster had stuck in the wheel well of Paul LeClaire’s Toyota had led the pair here. Probably believing police were surrounding his home, the IT man was on the run.
The device had led them only to this wing of the motel, but his room number was easy to deduce. His car sat in front of room 104, the only occupied one on this wing.
“Didn’t think to park around back?” Shaw mused.
Nilsson said, “Good at stealing parts from his employer. Not so good at tradecraft.”
“You a former officer?” he asked.
The job title in this context would mean CIA.
She said, “No. But I worked with Langley some.”
That she didn’t give the name of her former employer made Shaw wonder if she’d ever crossed paths with his brother. Russell too worked for some anonymous government security agency. But now was not the time for it’s-a-small-world conversations.
She steered around the corner and parked.
Nilsson said, “You’re carrying.”
He nodded. Like Abe Lincoln, she’d noticed this too. But it was an easy deduction by a pro. Shaw, for his part, had seen that she too was armed. Inside the waistband, like his. No woman in this line of work ever carried her weapon in a purse.
“Odds that he is?” she asked.
Shaw considered. “Ten percent. When everything was going down in the factory, he wanted to climb under a desk till it was over.”
A smile crossed her face.
“How do you want to handle it?”
He said, “We’ll get his hands up — in case of that ten percent — and let him see the money out the window. He’ll say no. We make him stay at attention. I collect the cash. Then we leave.” He looked at her. “And have lunch.”
“I like that plan.”
Shaw took the attaché case holding the fake hundred thousand and set it in front of the window for him to see. He pulled out his phone and called the hotel, then asked for room 104. The clerk said they needed a name to connect to a room. He shared this with Nilsson, who said, “Probably not using his real one. But give it a shot.”
“Paul LeClaire.”
“Yessir, I’ll connect you.”
Nilsson muttered, “Oh, brother...”
After eight rings: “Um, hello?”
Shaw said in a stern voice, “Paul, you have two options. If you hang up on me, a SWAT team’ll be in your room in five minutes. Or you can hear me out.”
“Who—”
“Two options.”
“I... Okay. I’m listening.” The familiar whimpering grew more pronounced.
“We met today at the factory.”
“You! If I come out you’ll kill me.”
“Paul. Open the drapes and window. And keep your hands where we can see them.”
“Do it now,” Nilsson called.
After a brief pause the curtain parted. LeClaire stood, a deer in headlights, staring out the window into the parking lot. His hands raised, like a stickup victim in an old Western. He wore the same clothing he had on earlier. His white shirt was stained from the yellow smoke. Shaw approached. He examined the room. It appeared clear.
Shaw then explained the offer to buy back the S.I.T.
In a quivering voice the man said, “I don’t know anything about it.”
Shaw sighed. “Paul... Mr. Harmon wants it back.”
There was no answer for that. “I...”
“That’s a hundred thousand dollars. No questions asked.”
“I...” The pronoun stretched out this time. Quite lengthy.
“It’s out of the country, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Which was enough of an answer for Shaw.
His eyes met Nilsson’s and she nodded. LeClaire, and the others, now had confirmation they’d gotten the real S.I.T.
She kept her hand near her weapon while Shaw stepped forward and collected the attaché case.
As they walked toward her Range Rover, LeClaire shouted, “Wait! Can I move now? Can I lower my hands?”
Disconnecting the call, Shaw said to Nilsson, “So how about that lunch?”
14
Don’t think about the damn thing, she told herself.
Allison Parker, doing the ungainly and adored butterfly stroke, finished her laps and climbed from the backyard pool. She’d done a mile today.
Do. Not. Think.
The forty-two-year-old brunette, tall and in taut athletic shape, was wearing a blue Speedo one-piece. She pulled off the matching swim cap and snagged a towel. The cap helped but wasn’t a tight seal. Her hair, long and curly, dripped, tickling. This she blotted first, and then dried the rest of her body.
Don’t think...
Swimming occasionally came with a memory: of another pool, the one in the backyard of the house she’d recently sold. Their marital home. Former marital home. She could picture the lapping water, the comforting blue tiles, the stonework of the deck, the mismatched metal and plastic furniture on the stone patio.
But those images were overshadowed by what she’d been thinking of today, while trying not to. The white cement sculpture, a shallow three-dimensional relief in the wall of the rinse-off shower beside the pool.
A seahorse.
The creatures can be comical or eerie or sensuous. The one at their old house was supposed to be the last of those, smoothly curved and with a seductive eye.
Don’t think... But think she did.
She sees the snowflakes falling delicately, landing on the creature’s head and back and tail. Flakes melting. It appears to be crying.
Mid-November. The family is in the kitchen. Parker is thinking of Christmas baskets and baking. Jon and Hannah are working on a school project.
But then he rises and, with that damn look in his eyes, says he has to go out. He won’t be long.
“No, please,” she says. Not a woman who begs, she is begging now.
The night has been good. It doesn’t need to go bad.
Parker brought herself out of the memory and finished blotting, hung the towel on a rack, to dry in the sun, pale though it was. She wrapped a glaring-yellow SpongeBob SquarePants towel around her, stepped into her orange flip-flops.
Her hair drooped, stringy. Center parted, it ended at her shoulders.
She glanced at her reflection in the glass patio door. This’s quite the look. She laughed. She untucked the towel, rearranged it. The cartoon character’s wide gaping eyes had exactly covered her breasts.
Then into the small house, ranch-style, three bedrooms. It was nondescript to the point of being invisible, built to rent, not own.
The clear autumn day was warm, but the AC was going full blast, as Hannah had set it, hardly necessary. Maybe if the girl didn’t wear sweats all day, she wouldn’t have to push the boundaries of the electric bill.
But some battles you fought, some you didn’t.
Allison Parker would never waste parenting capital on the trivial.
The sixteen-year-old sat on the brown leather living room couch. She had a pretty, round face, framed by shoulder-length center-parted hair; she was her father’s blond. Currently a red streak dominated the right side. She was huddled, lost in her phone, texting. Her feet were bare. She’d been painting her toenails — a deep mahogany — and had apparently been interrupted by a vital message.
Six piggies down, four to go.
“You’ve got math,” Parker said.
“I did it.”
“All of it?”
Fingers moving on the phone’s keypad, fast as startled hummingbirds. “Yeah.”
Parker finger-combed her curls. “Let me see.”
A pause. “Maybe there’s a little more.”
“Hannah.” Her voice was stern. The deceptions had been coming more frequently lately. Small, but a lie is a lie.
A sigh. “All right. I’ll do it.”
“Thank you.” Parker glanced at the coffee table, where the assignment sheets sat.
She’d let the girl take a mental health day. After the incident last November, her daughter had had to cope with three traumas: a mother who’d been badly injured, a father jailed for the crime and life under a microscope at school. (Every student would have known about the incident a half hour after it happened. Thank you, social media — though Parker supposed that fifty years ago, word would have spread almost as quickly via analog phone calls. And before that? Telegraph and twice-daily newspapers. Nothing can stop the spread of a good, horrific story.)
Hannah was certainly improving, but there were bad days. How much of this was because of the incident and how much because of teenageness, though, was impossible to tell.
Without looking up from her toes, Hannah said, “The smell’s still there.”
The landlord had painted the house before they moved in and, yes, whatever he’d used had off-gassed an unpleasant sweetness.
“Won’t be long till we get our Greenstone.” A reference to the fortress the girl, at ten, had loved hearing her mother describe as she read a fantasy book aloud before bed every night. She’d gotten the Greenstone Lego set one Christmas, to her breathless delight.
Now Hannah gave no response. She fielded another text. Eyes down, she said, “Windows?”
Prone to paranoia and exceedingly security conscious, Parker kept the windows closed and locked at all times. This would be why the girl had the AC cranked up, of course. A bit of passive-aggressive sniping?
Probably.
Parker inhaled. She thought it was better. “We’ll air it out on Saturday.”
The girl sent another text.
“Hannah. Phone down. Now.”
With a tint of exasperation the girl complied.
Parker slid the assignments in front of her daughter, who scooted closer to the coffee table. Her mother scanned them. There were five problems still to do for class. Five out of seven. So not exactly just “a little more.”
Parker tapped problem 2.
Find the domain of function f(x) = 
.
Her daughter glanced down and then returned to polishing a nail.
“Hannah,” Parker said. Usually her mother referred to the girl in the light, truncated form of her name. The full two syllables contained a hint of warning.
Without looking up, the girl recited, “The domain’s the intersection of two sets.” She lifted a pen and wrote the answer in fast, careless script:
The first set is x ≤ 1. The second is −2
Her mother blinked and gave a soft laugh. “That’s right.”
Hannah’s expression said: obviously.
Parker raised her hand, five-high. The girl grimaced and returned an unenthusiastic tap.
Lord...
Parker was hardly surprised at the speed of the correct answer. The girl’s brilliance had been obvious for years. It just mystified her that she made the calculations so effortlessly, while Parker herself labored to arrive at the finish line.
So why did the girl have so little interest in a subject she was so good at, while preferring the arts: photography, drawing and writing?
“Get the rest of them done.”
“Okay.” A pause. “I was texting Kyle?”
“Were you?” Something was brewing. Parker measured responses. “How is he?”
“Cool. He says you’re pretty.”
“That’s very sweet.”
Another glance at a question. Hannah jotted more numbers, letters and symbols on the homework sheet. This answer too was right. The girl said, “He’s going to the mall tomorrow. He’s got to pick up a present for his brother.”
Hannah was clearly asking if she could join him. Students as young as thirteen or fourteen pseudo-dated — really just hanging out together, more flirtatious than anything, and in theory Parker had no problem with her daughter doing so. But her mother’s swelling unease usually kicked in and derailed plans.
Parker warned her daughter about the level of crime in the tough, under-policed city of Ferrington, which was certainly true.
But she didn’t tell her the full truth.
About how much risk they both might be in because of her ex.
And so she kept the girl close.
But now, in a reward for her tackling the homework, she said, “I think that’ll work out.”
In response to the tacit question: Can I go too?
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Finish up. Pizza for dinner?”
A bright smile.
She’d use the meal to learn more about Kyle. She’d met him twice and he seemed nice. She wanted to know more.
Shivering, she headed into her bedroom to change into jeans and, what else, given the temperature? A sweatshirt.
On the way to her dresser she glanced at her phone, lying faceup on the bed.
She stopped in mid-stride, feeling her heart ratchet up.
Eleven missed calls.
Parker listened to the first message.
“Oh, Christ...”
15
Packing.
Fast.
Careless.
In jeans, a gray sweatshirt and a quilted baby-blue vest, Allison Parker was tossing random clothes into a large gym bag and backpack with shaking hands, her muscles weak. “Two years early? Letting him out?” Spoken aloud or to herself? She didn’t know.
Hannah was in her room, slowly debating what to put into her own luggage.
“Just the basics! Get going.”
“Jesus, Mom. Chill.”
Her phone sounded with a noisy rock song she’d loaded because her daughter liked it. Her lawyer, David Stein, was calling back. Her quivering hands nearly dropped it. She plugged in earbuds and continued filling the suitcase. She stepped farther into her bedroom so her daughter couldn’t hear her side of the conversation.
“How did it happen?” she asked.
“I don’t know. You ask me, he worked them. He did one of his slick songs and dances.” He fell silent a moment. Then said in a voice even more somber: “Listen to me, Allison. There’s something else you need to know.” A pause, as if working up his courage. “After he got out, a couple of cons — prisoners — went to a guard. They said Jon had told them when he got out, he wants to find you.” Decibels dropped as he continued. “He wants to find you and kill you.”
Allison Parker lowered her head.
“Of course he does...”
Maybe whispered, maybe thought.
“What, Alli? I didn’t hear you.”
So, whispered.
She was thinking. So, here it was: the moment she’d dreaded, the moment she’d thought she could dodge forever. And the plans she’d made for disappearing with Hannah to a new life, somewhere far away, before he was released were useless.
Of course he does...
She asked, “Do they know where he is?”
“No. He has twenty-four hours to register with his parole officer, with an address. He hasn’t. I talked to a detective at FPD. After what those cons told them, there’ll be officers looking for him.”
What to take? Jeans, sweats, underwear, socks, perfume... Wait, perfume? She set it back on the dresser, choosing Tampax and Advil instead.
“We’re leaving town.”
“You should. Where?”
“I don’t know. I’m not telling anybody. I’ll call from the road. Only your landline. I don’t trust mobiles.”
Paranoia was the unreasonable concern about an imaginary threat. The danger Jon Merritt presented was real.
“Alli—”
She disconnected, staring at a drawing Hannah had done at age ten. A watercolor on white construction paper. A unicorn, its coat the spectrum of a rainbow.
This musing lasted only seconds. The past had arrived. She would now make sure she and her daughter had a future.
Parker shoved the door open and walked into the hallway, gripping the bag and backpack firmly.
The girl was sitting on her bed, beside a half-filled gym bag. Inside were only her computer and a few articles of clothing. She was texting.
“No, no.”
The girl glanced her way.
In a low voice, as steady as her hands were now, Parker said, “Phone away. Finish. I fucking mean it.”
“Language!”
“I don’t have time for that. Pack.”
The girl shot an exasperated look her mother’s way, then rose, slipped her phone into her right rear pocket. She started sifting through drawers. Parker stepped quickly into Hannah’s room and filled her bag and backpack with random clothes and toiletries.
“Wait. I want to take—”
“No.” This word was a growl.
Parker hurried into the kitchen and looked out into the backyard, half expecting her ex to come charging out of the bushes, holding a baseball bat or axe.
She loaded the electronics into a Whole Foods reusable bag — phone and computer chargers and cords, her Dell laptop, a seventeen-inch model, a Wi-Fi router, battery packs.
“Where are we going?” the girl whined. “You said I could go to the mall!”
“Your bags. Now. We’re leaving.”
She reluctantly picked them up. “So Dad’s out of jail? So what?”
Of course he does...
They had just walked out the front door when the girl stopped and ran back into the house.
“Hannah!” Parker called. “No!”
“I can’t,” came the girl’s voice.
“What?”
“My iPad. I’m not going anywhere without it!”
16
In the backyard of his ex-wife’s house on Maple View, Jon Merritt was making his way through the brush toward the back door.
He tensed and crouched as he heard an engine roar.
His ex’s SUV raced over the curb and skidded around the corner onto Cross County Highway, heading west.
Goddamn.
He began sprinting back to his truck, which he’d parked three blocks away, just to be safe. As he ran, he pressed his hand against the grip of the pistol so it didn’t fly from his belt. In the garbage-decorated alley behind the Ferrington City Diner, Ryan’s man had, yes, conducted a vigorous frisk for wires. Unnecessarily rough, but Merritt was more offended that a battered two-hundred-dollar gun was priced at seven, no negotiation.
Supply and demand...
Gasping, he continued along the sidewalk, dodging a homeless man, as he watched her 4Runner. It was closer than he’d expected. He could catch them.
Had she seen him? Or had somebody called her with the news he was free?
The run hurt, muscles and lungs. He was out of shape. You might lift weights in prison but you don’t get aerobics. Nobody runs.
Breathing hard, gasping, he got to the Ford and leapt into the driver’s seat, shoved the key into the ignition and started the engine.
As long as he wasn’t lit up for speeding they were in his grasp. Any cops nearby? Probably not. Random traffic patrols were not budget-strapped Ferrington’s strong suit. Anyway, sometimes you just had to take a chance.
Into gear, spinning the wheel and slamming down the accelerator.
The big truck bolted forward.
And began to stagger.
Thump, thump, thump, thump...
He braked hard, dropped the transmission into park and, shoving the door open, stepped out onto the asphalt.
For Christ’s sake...
He closed his eyes in disgust and fury. She could’ve gone east or west but chose west and spotted the truck. She had let the air out of the right front tire. It was completely flat.
He gazed up Cross County to where the battered asphalt disappeared into the hills. She was already out of sight.
Merritt lowered his head to the driver’s-side window.
After a full minute of letting the anger pass, he pulled out his phone. He composed a text saying that plans had changed — Allison had fled and he needed help finding her. He’d get back soon with specifics. He would pay. A lot.
The response, affirmative, came back in a matter of seconds.
Merritt looked west, into the afternoon sun. Where are you going? he thought. Where the hell...?
He was startled when a voice intruded. “Hey, mister, need a hand?” The question came from a middle-aged man. He was in a casual jacket and slacks. Apparently just out for a stroll on a gentle fall afternoon.
Merritt was inclined to say no, the fewer people who could place him here the better. But the guy had already seen him and Merritt was pressed by urgency. “You don’t mind getting your hands dirty. Always hard to lift up the spare and get it on the lugs.”
The man took his jacket off and rested it on a nearby hedge. “Don’t I know it? They give you a jack for the car; they oughta give you a jack for the tire.”
Merritt said, “Now, there’s an invention for you.”
The men walked to the back of the truck and the neighbor unwound the spare while Merritt got the jack and the tools from the compartment in the bed.
He fitted the device to the bracket on the undercarriage while the neighbor wheeled the spare up. He surveyed Merritt, who was energetically working the jack handle. “You’re in some hurry there, sir.”
Merritt scowled. “Just going to pay a visit to my wife and daughter. Who I haven’t seen for a long time. I’ve been away. And this happens.”
“Isn’t that always the way? But we’ll get you back on the road fast as we can. You must miss ’em.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Merritt said, breathing in gasps as he pumped.
And under his frantic hands, the two-ton vehicle rose slowly into the air like a ghost leaving a recently deceased body.
17
There it is. Our most famous attraction. Get out your Polaroid.”
Sonja Nilsson slowed the Range Rover and pointed. They were downtown on the road that paralleled the Kenoah. Across the river was a tall brick building not unlike the others here. Mounted on the portion of the building’s foundation just above the surface was a ten-foot-diameter clock, in art deco style. The face and hands, frozen at ten until two, were the green of aged copper and the brown of rust.
“The Ferrington Water Clock. That building, it was the Carnegie Iron Works. The CEO — no, not that Carnegie — wanted a public relations gimmick. His radiators and car parts weren’t sexy enough to get traction. So he had it commissioned. It ran on the river’s current. People’d come from all over the state to see it and get pictures of themselves with the clock in the background.”
“When did it stop? And I’ve got the ten-to-two part.”
She laughed. “Long time after Carnegie did. The city kept it going, but money dried up. Probably twenty years ago. The hands: people call them the ‘Angel Wings.’ ”
The SUV accelerated fast, then turned away from the river at the next intersection. She told him she had a pub in mind she thought he might like.
She was wearing aviator shades. He’d tried to get a look at her eyes. He really wanted to know if the color was from genes or from plastic.
After some silence he asked a common silence-breaking question. “How’d you end up here?”
“Now, that is a long story. I’ll trim.” Her voice, enwrapped in that lovely Southern accent, was low. The word sultry came to mind. “I wanted to — yes, see the world — so I joined up. Did a couple tours in Hawaii and California. Met a boy, also from Birmingham. After our hitches, we went home, got married. Yeah, ‘hitched!’ That didn’t work out... Not his fault. I’m a tough person to live with.”
The confession amused him. It seemed almost like a warning.
“I wanted to stay in security. A job recruiter told me about an opening at Harmon Energy. I liked the product, liked Marty’s mission — helping save the poor. So. Here I am. Sorry you asked, aren’t you?”
“Think you trimmed just right.”
A car passed at speed — and she was well over the limit. The Acura SUV had tinted windows. A problem?
Nilsson said, “It’s good.” Her eyes had been following the car’s trajectory too. “Any threat would have presented by now.”
More miles rolled by: brown and flat. Shaw had grown up surrounded by mountains.
“When my friend Tom called about the job, I thought ‘Ferrington’ was familiar. Something in the news. Crime, I think.”
“The corruption cases Marty was talking about?”
“No, violent.”
“Oh, the Street Cleaner? Serial killer.”
“That’s it.”
“Few years ago, somebody was shooting street people — a homeless guy, tweakers, a woman in the sex trade. Mostly around Manufacturers Row.”
Shaw remembered those people he’d seen around the riverwalk, after the S.I.T. operation.
She added, “Still an open case. Whoever it was, was smart. Cleaned up afterward. You ever work a case with a psycho?”
Shaw called them “jobs” not “cases” but felt no need to explain. “Once. Killed four women. Brilliant. Medical student. The police caught him but he got away. Vanished completely. After a month, the county posted a reward.”
“You found him?”
“I did.”
“How?”
“Staked out plastic surgeons.”
She gave a laugh. “Smart.”
Shaw’s eyes were drawn to a gaudy yellow billboard.
It was one of a dozen lawyers’ signs decorating the highway.
Another sign was:
Someone had climbed to the bottom of the billboard and spray-painted:
She noticed his gaze.
“Kick in the teeth,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“Ferrington survived the downturns. You catch that, Colter?”
“Plural.”
“Yep. The city was the iron capital of the Midwest a hundred and fifty years ago.”
The Range Rover was automatic but she used the steering-wheel paddles, which was manual transmission light, not real shifting. Still, it was more fun than just using your right foot and it let you tach into the red.
“Ferrington was never a pretty city. But it was grand. It was alive. It had more factories and rail yards than any city in the state. The hotels were as fancy as anything in Memphis or St. Louis.”
“But then,” Shaw said.
“But then. Iron was out and steel was in. That meant Gary and Pittsburgh and New Jersey were the new meccas of industry. And after that, China and Japan. Recently things started to look up. Some outfits saw cheap real estate and bought up some of the old buildings — Marty’s company, a chipmaker, and there’s a government contractor makes some parts or another for the Defense Department, nobody knows what. Amazon was considering a distribution center on Route Eighty-four. That got everybody excited. Things were looking up.”
“And the tooth kick?”
“The water. Nobody knew how polluted the old factory sites were. When they cleared acreage for the redevelopments, it unearthed the toxins. The Kenoah’s worse than the Ohio, the Tennessee and the Ward Cove.”
“What’s it polluted with?”
“Quite a cocktail. Coal tars, heavy metals, aromatic hydrocarbons, MTBE.”
Shaw shook his head.
“Methyl tert-butyl ether. Never heard of it either, but all you have to do is read the Daily Herald for the past six months and you’ll learn enough to get a degree in chemistry.
“And the companies looking our way were reading all about it too. Like that billboard? United Defense? They were going to be hiring fifteen hundred people on two campuses. Now it’s on hold, and probably not going to go through. Same with American Household Products. That hire was going to be eight hundred.”
Hence: Asshat...
“They going to reassess when the cleanup’s done?”
Nilsson said, “It’s not like washing cars, you know: goes in dirty and comes out all buffed and shiny. It’s a slow process. CEOs don’t want to gamble their shareholders’ money — and their own bonuses — that the same thing won’t happen next year. Here we are.”
She skidded the SUV to an abrupt stop in a gravel parking lot in front of Mitchell’s. The pub and attached inn were both rustic and quaint, with dark wood siding and forest-green trim on windows and doors. A flagstone path snaked lazily to the entrance.
Nice place, Shaw reflected. An objective assessment; he was not one for atmosphere. As long as there was a local beer on tap and something substantial to eat — burger or steak — the place would do. Also, he hoped for relative quiet.
After they both did subtle security scans of the area around them, Nilsson and Shaw walked to the door. He was encouraged to see a sign.
In his travels Colter Shaw liked to sample local brews.
That satisfied his first wish, and the second was likely to be granted too, judging from the smell of grilling meat.
They climbed the three stone steps to the porch that fronted the inn, and as they did, their shoulders brushed. They shared a glance. Shaw was reaching for the door handle when Nilsson’s phone chimed. She carried two. This was an iPhone. The other was larger and more complex, maybe satellite. Nilsson read the text.
Her lips tightened.
“It’s Marty. I have to go into the office.” She looked up. “He asked for you too.”
18
“That was mean.”
Piloting the 4Runner west from Ferrington at just over the limit, Allison Parker glanced at her daughter, who sat knees up, in the front seat, looking at her computer.
“What?”
“Daddy’s tire.”
Parker turned back to the road.
As they’d hurried away from the house, without the iPad, Parker had skidded onto Cross County Highway and sped up, but then — to her horror — she had seen a white Ford F-150 parked curbside and empty. She braked hard. Yes, it was Jon’s — she knew the dings and scrapes. Looking around, she didn’t see him. He’d be at the house about three blocks away. She had only minutes. “Stay here,” she’d ordered. “Do not get out.”
Parker had jogged to the truck, looked in the bed for something she could slash the tires with. Nothing. So she’d unscrewed the air nozzle cap and with a twig bled the air out of the right front. Thought about the left but decided it was too risky to stay longer.
After five or so miles she had made another fast stop, scattering gravel and flattened cans on the shoulder. Glancing continually in the rearview mirror, she had sent emails to her mother and Marty Harmon, telling them what had happened and that she and Hannah were leaving. She’d be in touch when it was safe. She left a message with David that he’d been to the house — a violation of the restraining order. He could now be arrested.
Finally she responded to her daughter’s earlier comment. “I didn’t do it to be mean. I did it to keep us safe.”
“Safe?”
Parker was not prepared to tell Hannah that her father’s intent was to kill her. She said softly, “Hannah, please. You know his tantrums, all the times he lost control? How mad he was at me for pressing charges? If he’s drinking again, and I’m sure he is—”
“You don’t fucking know that!”
Parker did not, of course, go to “Language!”
“He could make a scene. He could hurt somebody, even if he doesn’t mean to. Or hurt himself. He can’t legally be on our property. He could get into a fight with the police.”
“Maybe he was just coming by to apologize.”
Oh, sure, Parker thought in her most cynical silent voice.
She glanced at the Dell in her daughter’s lap.
Parker had the only router, so the girl wasn’t online... Or was she?
She might’ve bought a pay-as-you-go Wi-Fi with her allowance.
“Are you online?”
“What? No.”
“Turn your screen.”
“Seriously?”
“Your screen. I want to see you’re in airplane mode.”
“How could I get online? You won’t let me have a jetpack. Like everybody else.”
She defiantly turned the computer and for a moment Parker thought she was going to pitch the Dell into her face. Oh, the girl had definitely inherited some of her father’s disposition.
She squinted. It was just GIMP, a photo-editing program like Photoshop.
“I’m sorry. But we need to take charge of this.”
“You’re, like, totally overthinking. You’re the one who said he’s two different people.”
True, she had. Though she’d told Hannah this to leave a portion of the good memories of past years intact. She had not added that multiple personalities were also a defining quality of sociopaths.
She’d meant when he was drinking, but she had also wondered if, even when he was sober, the dark side could eventually come to predominate, and the generous and reasonable persona vanish.
Could a brain’s nature be fundamentally and permanently changed?
Why not? It could be done with real wiring and capacitors; why not with neurons and synapses?
Finally Hannah broke the silence. “Where are we going?”
“I’m thinking about that.”
Parker had yet to work out a destination. Immediate escape had been her priority. Now she drove along the Cross County, old warehouses and developments giving way to grazing land and razored cornfields and dense forests. At Route 55, miles west of Ferrington, she made a sharp turn south, left, and drove five miles to the small town of Carter Grove, where strip malls and a multiplex and a dusty golf course defined civilization.
She parked in one of these malls now, in front of a nail salon. She said sternly, “Wait here. Do not get out of the car.”
The girl gave her a look.
“Hannah.”
“All right.”
Parker snagged a logo-free blue baseball cap from the backseat, tugged it on. She climbed out and, carrying her large brown leather Coach purse, walked around the corner to First Federal Bank. She returned less than ten minutes later, dropping the purse on the floor of the backseat.
Leaving this mall, she pulled into another, anchored by a Target. This time she insisted Hannah come with her. They went inside and Parker bought a burner phone. The clerk, a skinny boy, shot a flirt at Hannah, who vaporized him with a look.
Turning to mom, he said, “The phone, it’s tricky, kinda. I’ll set it up, you like.”
It wouldn’t be tricky at all but he could use his computer to activate the device. She wanted to keep all their existing devices offline.
Fifteen minutes later, they were in the car once more. She started the engine and her eyes went to the Toyota’s navigation screen.
“Is there a way to shut it off?”
The girl’s perplexed look was wildly exaggerated. She only shrugged.
Parker tapped the touch screen a few times but didn’t see a way to disconnect it from the satellite. That probably involved going into the dash.
She asked Hannah, “There’s a bus station in Herndon, right?”
“Bus?”
But Parker remembered that there was. Downtown. She put the SUV in gear and steered back onto Route 55, scattering gravel as, this time, they drove north.
Hannah muttered, “I don’t want to take a bus. They’re gross. Jesus, Mom, what? You think he can track the car? He doesn’t have superpowers.”
Except that, yes, Jon Merritt did.
Her ex-husband had been a decorated and popular Ferrington Police Department detective, sixteen years on the force. He still had plenty of friends at FPD, men who didn’t give a shit about a drinking problem and an arrest for spousal assault. (A desent wife would have got him help you bitch! read one anonymous email she’d received.) It wasn’t impossible that he’d appeal to these friends, on the QT, to peek at server information and highway cameras to track her.
And even more troubling were the contacts he’d made on the other side of the law. She knew that as a cop, Jon had cut deals with some of the most dangerous organized crime bosses in and around Ferrington. Maybe at this very moment he was calling in a favor: Help me hunt down my ex...
And if that didn’t give him the superpowers of a Marvel Comics character, it came damn close.
19
Shaw and Sonja Nilsson walked into the same office they had been in not two hours earlier.
Marty Harmon gestured to the couch.
At the moment he was all edge and sniper. The humor was gone.
The two of them sat and Harmon eased forward in his chair. “LeClaire?”
Nilsson said, “Did just what we thought. Didn’t take the money. Probably called the buyers right after we left to tell them that they have the real trigger.”
Or that’s what he did when he lowered his arms, which was undoubtedly somewhat after Shaw and Nilsson’s departure.
Harmon said, “I talked to our tech department. The GPS is still dark. They’re monitoring it.”
The fake S.I.T.’s tracker was on a timer so as not to be detected on planes. Many passengers didn’t know that pilots could tell if someone was trying to use a mobile phone on an aircraft.
But it was clear that LeClaire was not the first thing on his mind. He absently rubbed a thick finger against the side of his pug nose. “Something’s come up. The engineer who developed the S.I.T.?”
Shaw nodded. “We interviewed her. Allison...”
“Parker.”
The clear-eyed brunette, furious that her “baby” had been stolen, had been helpful in running through procedures for securing the components and the mesoporous nano material.
It was the woman Harmon had described as “brilliant.”
“Alli was married to an abusive husband. Jon Merritt. About a year ago he tried to kill her. Put her in the hospital. Got three years in prison. Only he was released early — this morning. Alli sent me an email saying she was going into hiding, with her daughter. She wouldn’t say where. She probably was terrified he’d find out.”
“She thinks she’s in danger?” Shaw asked.
“Oh, she is. Her lawyer told me she knows something about Jon, his past, something that he didn’t want to get out. And that may have been why he wanted to kill her in the first place.”
“What?”
“David didn’t know.” Harmon’s fists balled up. “But if there was any doubt, get this, just after he’s released, a couple of prisoners go to a supervisor. Merritt told them first thing he was going to do when he got out was kill her. Merritt was completely calm about it. Like talking about a game. They said it looked like he didn’t care what happened to him. Maybe murder-suicide, killing their girl too.”
Nilsson shook her head, frowning.
“How’d the prison miss that?” Shaw asked.
Harmon scoffed. “I don’t think they take a poll of fellow prisoners in deciding to release somebody or not. And why didn’t the board or the prison shrink pick it up? I’ve met Merritt. He can be charming, funny, your best friend. He played the staff.”
Nilsson said, “I think I met him. A party here. Christmas. Caused a scene. Bad one. It got physical. Somebody was hurt.”
“Has he done anything illegal yet?” Shaw asked.
“Violated a restraining order.”
“Misdemeanor. But there’d be a technical warrant. Police have a stakeout on her house, right?”
“No. FPD staffing, remember? Part of the reason I hired you. And probably another reason the board didn’t ask too many questions. The system’s always cut Merritt some slack. He was a cop, a revered cop. A hero. He was almost killed saving his partner’s life.” The scowl was broad. “And there’s some bullshit feeling that Alli was too fast to press charges. Should’ve gotten him some help instead.”
Nilsson muttered, “Seriously? Patting the little lady on the head, saying, oh, it wasn’t so bad.”
“Merritt?” Shaw asked. “Any possible connection to the theft of the S.I.T.?”
Harmon’s shoulders fell. “First thing I thought of when I heard about what he had in mind. But I can’t see it. If he even heard of the S.I.T., it would’ve been over a year ago. And he was in prison when LeClaire was contacted by our friends.
“Now, Mr. Shaw... Colter. I’m in a real bind here.” His sniper eyes were trained on Shaw’s. “Alli’s a friend. I’ve known her for years. But — okay, you’ve guessed it — I need her. She’s my senior engineer. She’s developing another product that’s got to be finished before we can launch. And there’ll be others after that.”
His muscles were taut and veins that had been invisible rose and darkened. “I called the FBI again and they don’t have jurisdiction, unless he crosses state lines. And we know how much the police are going to help.
“I don’t have anywhere else to turn.” A pause. “You do this for a living — finding people. Will you? Find Alli and Hannah and keep them safe until he’s back in prison?”
Shaw was thinking of his meeting with the woman, whose mind danced from idea to idea regarding the logistics of how a thief might make off with the components — a session interrupted at one point when her mobile buzzed and a smile appeared. She’d said, “Excuse me. It’s my daughter. I have to take this.” And had answered.
Shaw said, “Let me get my notebook and pen.”
20
The helpful neighbor had refused the twenty that Jon Merritt had offered for assisting with the tire, saying, “No, sir, no, sir, thank you for the offer but it’s the Christian thing to do. Pay it forward. Put it in the plate at church.”
He’d be assuming that Merritt attended; any man that didn’t cuss at a flat tire had to be religious.
The instant he put the tools away Merritt had jumped into the truck and took off in the direction Allison had vanished.
He was now fifteen miles out of Ferrington. Moving quickly at exactly the magic — that is, safe — six miles over the limit. The road he was on, Cross County Highway, had few motels, he knew from his days on the force, when he worked Vice and was obsessed with ridding the city of sex trade and drugs. He doubted she’d stay this close to home anyway. Maybe Monroe or Pickford, but even those seemed unlikely. She’d go for distance.
And she wouldn’t fly. She’d know that he still had connections and maybe one of them could pull flight manifests. She’d want anonymity. And that meant escaping by car, bus or train. No, train was unlikely; there was freight service in Ferrington but no passenger trains for a hundred miles.
So, car or bus.
He continued on 55 to Herndon, which had the only bus depot nearby.
It was an old mill town, now devoted to outlet malls, healthcare and auto sales and repair. The depot was in the center of town, a neighborhood badly in need of a face-lift that would never happen. Merritt circled the terminal in his truck. In the back lot sat a half-dozen coaches, idling as diesel exhaust perfumed the air. There was a large parking area for cars contiguous to the bus tarmac. His ex’s 4Runner wasn’t here.
Pausing at an intersection, he ignored the horn of the driver behind him and looked up and down the street. He turned left, cutting off another car and earning a finger. About two hundred yards along the broad commercial avenue he pulled into a Walmart lot. He cruised the rows. After hitting them all, he steered into the back lot. Here, two dozen vehicles sat in the shade under a thick overhang of oak boughs.
One of them was her Toyota. Empty of people, empty of luggage.
The SUV had been left within walking distance of the bus depot.
He returned to the truck, fired it up and skidded back onto the highway, this time scoring two horns. A few minutes later he was at the station. A street dweller approached Merritt, hand out. The responding look seared the man and he turned and walked away fast, muttering.
Inside, a half-dozen waiting passengers sat on formfitting benches, talking and reading texts and playing games on their phones. He walked to the counter.
“Afternoon,” he said to the clerk, a heavyset man of dark complexion, wearing a light blue suit and red tie, white shirt. Merritt flashed his expired police ID and a fake badge that years ago he’d taken off a meth dealer posing as a federal agent. These had been in the U-Store, the bag his ex had dumped unceremoniously into a bin. Along with the trash.
He tucked them away immediately.
“Yes, Officer?”
Merritt displayed a picture of his ex and daughter. “Did these two individuals buy tickets in the last hour?”
The clerk’s eyes gave a flash of recognition.
Nobody read body language better than Detective First Jon Merritt.
“Hold on a second, sir.” The man’s eyes dropped to a screen and he typed.
Was he calling up sales records? Or security footage? There were several cameras here.
The clerk continued to type, then stopped, and a moment later they were joined by another man. Also Black, also in a suit. His name was Titus Jones, according to the plate on his lapel, and an additional line indicated he was the general manager.
“Sir, you’re police?”
No backing up now. “That’s right.”
“And you’re looking for those individuals in connection with an investigation?”
“Parental kidnapping.”
“I see. Well, we can’t give out any passenger information without a warrant.”
“I understand. I just happened to follow a lead here and stopped in. Thought maybe you could help me out, so I don’t have to go to the magistrate.” He smiled.
Jon Merritt could be the master of charm when he needed to be.
Jones said, “Mr. Randall here said you displayed an ID card. Who’re you with? Mr. Randall missed it.”
Merritt noticed an armed security guard in the corner, looking his way.
“Ferrington PD.”
“Let me take a look at that again. Maybe I’ll make a call and we can circumvent the warrant process.”
A pause. Tension rose. So did Merritt’s anger. He controlled it. Just.
“You know, Mr. Jones, it’s probably best to follow procedures. I’ll get started on that paperwork right now, back in the office.”
As he walked to the door, he snagged a timetable. Once in the cab of his truck, he sat back, calculating. She left her house at 2:50. Given that she would drive only slightly over the limit — like he’d done — she could be at the terminal at 3:45 if she came straight here. But he didn’t think this was the case. She’d had no warning that he was out of County. So she’d fled with only the basics. He guessed she’d stopped for money and — what he would have bought if he’d been in her shoes — a burner phone.
So add a half hour. He opened the timetable. What buses left around 4:15? There were two. One terminated in Detroit, the other St. Louis. The Michigan-bound bus was a local, making perhaps three dozen stops along the way. St. Louis was almost an express. It stopped at only four cities before it reached its destination.
Detroit... St. Louis...
Merritt stretched.
He thought back to a case years ago. He’d been working Narc and had been constantly stymied by a ruthless meth user, who was not your typical tweaker. He was brilliant. After robbing and killing a wealthy couple, the wiry skel vanished and no one could find him. This drove Merritt to rage. Finally, he forced himself to calm. He had to think not like the hunter, but like the prey. A week later Merritt kicked in the door of a cheap apartment in South Ferrington and with no little amount of satisfaction shot the man to death. He had, in effect, become the tweaker and realized, in a burst of inspired thought, where he’d gone.
Now his mind tried to get inside his ex’s. Oh, his thinking wasn’t nearly as sharp as it had been once. Could he do it?
Reciting to himself:
Detroit, St. Louis, Detroit, St. Louis...
21
“Funny how men — some men — can have this dark side. You don’t see it. They keep it hidden. Completely camouflaged. Then it’s like a snake striking.” Fingers snapped. “That’s Jon Merritt.”
Allison Parker’s mother, Ruth, was in Denver, speaking via Zoom to Harmon, Shaw and Nilsson, who had volunteered to help, an addition Shaw didn’t mind at all.
The CEO was behind his desk. The other two were on the couch again. When they’d sat their knees had touched and both moved away slightly. They now faced a large monitor on the wall.
Her hair long and brindle-brown and gray, Mrs. Parker was dressed in a dark red-plaid suit, a white blouse. She was in a den or study. Books filled the background. Many were about decoration and interior design.
“Hidden for years,” she continued. “Hid the drinking too. Until he didn’t care.”
Nilsson stared at the screen unemotionally but he believed her eyes flickered at this comment. Shaw wondered if the ex she’d referred to had behaved this way as well.
Mrs. Parker wore a stern gaze. “What kind of man hurts a woman? A husband cheats and you find out. It’s terrible.” She paused for a sliver of a second. “But it’s not physical. What Jon did to her last November...” Her eyelids dipped briefly.
Shaw supposed the laundry list of familial grievances was long, but to him it was irrelevant. They needed to start their search for mother and daughter now.
Harmon had introduced Shaw as a “personal protection expert” — which, in a way, he was. Mrs. Parker accepted this without asking more.
Shaw opened his notebook and turned to a fresh right-hand page, leaving behind his account of the S.I.T. theft, and uncapped the fountain pen. “Her emails? What did they say exactly?”
They were similar, telling each recipient about Merritt’s release and how she and Hannah were going away until he was caught for violating the restraining order and returned to prison. She was concerned he’d use the contacts he’d made as a cop to find her, and so they were staying off all social media and not using their phones or email any longer.
“Are you both sure they came from her?”
“How do you mean?” Harmon asked.
Sonja Nilsson: “It’s her email address and server?”
They both said that it was.
Shaw asked, “And language, punctuation?”
The two seemed perplexed.
Nilsson said, “We’re worried that Merritt sent it himself.”
“You mean he might’ve hurt her already?” Harmon asked, alarmed.
But Ruth said, “No, it was Alli, I’m positive. Her phrasing, you know. And she signed ‘OXOX,’ backward from normal. It was a joke just between us. Jon wouldn’t know that.”
Harmon scanned the email he’d received. “Yes, it sounds like her, the way she writes her memos and emails.”
Nilsson asked, “You emailed back?”
They both had, but she hadn’t responded.
Shaw asked, “Does Allison see her father?”
The woman’s fractured marital status was an easy deduction from her earlier comments.
“Once a year maybe. Not involved. Never was.”
Though, cheater that he had been, he’d never hit his wife.
“So she wouldn’t go stay with him?”
A laugh was the response.
“Any siblings?”
“No, Alli was an only child.”
Taking notes, Shaw pressed on the matter of friends. Success in the reward business — or in tracking in general — relies on people. Web history and car tags and video cams can be helpful but there’s nothing like a human for a source of information. Even if someone lies and swears the missing soul has gone east, if you read people carefully enough, you know he’s headed west.
Ruth thought for a moment and recited the names of several people her daughter had mentioned to her. The information was sketchy. She had no addresses or phone numbers and wasn’t even certain of the last names. Harmon could only offer a few; he and Parker did not socialize much, he explained.
Nilsson asked, “How about any favorite places she might go? Places that her ex wouldn’t know about?”
Her mother looked ceilingward. “She didn’t take vacations much.”
Harmon gave a wan smile. “It was hard to pry her out of the office.”
Shaw asked, “When she did go, any geographic preference? Mountains or forests, beach?”
“We didn’t do outdoors much when she was young. Resorts mostly. Recently? They never went to the beach that I heard about. Disney and Universal, places like that, with Hannah.”
Shaw asked, “Any phobias or aversions to any particular types of transportation or places?”
“You mean, does she get seasick?”
“Or carsick. Anything that might limit the distance she’d travel.”
“No, nothing like that,” Ruth said. “She and Hannah and I drove to some of the Summit ski areas two years ago. No issues, either of them.”
Shaw looked at Harmon, who shook his head. “Can’t help you there.”
“You think she’d know how to go off the grid?”
Ruth told them, “I know she and Jon and Hannah went camping some.” In a wry voice she added, “But that hasn’t been for a while; last I checked there weren’t a lot of bars in the woods. As for living in a tent and catching her own fish? No, that’s not Alli. She’s not one of those survivalist weirdos.”
Shaw kept the smile at bay. “Would she be armed?”
“No, no. She hated Jon keeping his gun in the house. Because of his drinking. And with what happened last November, she wouldn’t have anything to do with a gun.”
Shaw said, “If we’re lucky she’ll check email. Both of you send her a message asking her to call me or Sonja. She’ll remember me from the S.I.T. investigation.”
He recited the digits.
Both Harmon and Parker’s mother typed.
“Done,” she said.
Harmon asked, “What’re the odds she’ll read it?”
Colter Shaw, a man of assessing percentage likelihood in all aspects of his life, knew that sometimes there were simply too many variables and too little facts available to allow you to assign a number.
It was Nilsson who answered. “All we can do is hope.”
As good an appraisal as any.
“You’ll tell me how it’s going?” Ruth asked in a soft voice.
Harmon said, “Absolutely. Colter and Sonja’ll keep me posted, and I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you.”
Nilsson asked, “Mrs. Parker, why do you think she stayed with him?”
After a moment: “You hear that question a lot. Why do abused women stay with their men? Out of fear, I guess. Fear of loneliness...” She looked away. “And even when they work up the courage, and do the right thing, the brave thing, and walk away, they have to ask, is the empty house worth it? Sometimes the answer’s yes, sometimes the answer’s no.”
22
Mother and daughter were speeding north, once again on rough-and-ready Route 55.
Not on a bus, or in her SUV. But in a late model Kia sedan that she’d just rented.
Jon Merritt was a dangerous drunk but he had been a damn good detective. She bet that he’d guess she was so paranoid that she’d abandon her car and take an untraceable bus, buying tickets with cash.
That made sense.
But a bus did not fit into her own plan for escape. A Greyhound or Trailways would not take her where she wanted to go.
Where she had to go.
A place where she would be safe.
Yes, she had pulled into the depot lot, bought two tickets to St. Louis, making a minor scene when she complained that her change was wrong so the clerk would remember her. She’d grinned ruefully and apologized for mixing up the bills herself. She and Hannah had left and driven the Toyota to a nearby shopping center, which is exactly what somebody escaping from a smart, dangerous ex would do — not leaving it in the bus terminal lot.
Then, amid Hannah’s grumbling, they had walked a half mile to the car rental agency, lugging suitcases, gym bags and backpacks. She’d used her company credit card, which could ultimately be traced to her, but doing so would take some digging. Her engineering projects were made up of untold layers of subsystems and interfaces. Intimidating to many, these complications were simply part of a day’s work for Allison Parker and her mind had no problem juggling and sorting them.
She had planned that Jon would find the car, coerce a bus ticket clerk to give up their destination — maybe using an old badge of his — and then would hit the bus terminals on the way to St. Louis, figuring they’d get off before they reached the city with the famed arch. He would try to pick up the trail there.
As she figured, doing that would expose him to security cameras and raise suspicion. If she was lucky, he’d be spotted and arrested within twenty-four hours.
Allison Parker’s profession was engineering. She addressed her professional tasks systematically. She was, Marty Harmon had said about her, maybe the most goal-oriented and efficient person he’d ever met. She’d actually blushed when he’d said those words at an award ceremony.
“But Allison brings something more to the table. Her creativity.”
She had blushed again.
For this quality she had an idol to thank: the famed Billy Koen, the engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
She had read his landmark book Discussion of the Method a dozen times. It was the bible for approaching an engineering challenge. He wrote:
The engineering method is the use of heuristics to cause the best change in a poorly understood situation with the available resources.
The heuristic method was a problem-solving technique that didn’t pretend to be perfect: like trial and error, educated guessing.
The point was that you could rarely find the perfect solution to a problem. You started out, trying this and that, and slowly arrived at an answer that was sufficient.
It was through heuristics that she had invented the S.I.T. trigger and a unique fuel containment vessel for the Pocket Suns.
And Koen had suggested that “engineering” was far broader than its industrial or scientific definition. We are all engineers, he said, in every aspect of our lives.
It was this method that she’d used to come up with a plan to escape her ex-husband.
Several solutions had coalesced in her mind. She analyzed, established priorities, tested out models and the consequences of each.
Discarding, discarding, coming up with yet another. Discarding again.
Finally, she believed she had the best solution, under the circumstances.
Not perfect. Further refinements would be required.
But it was a start.
Now they sped north on 55, she sipping coffee that was burnt tasting but doctored with hazelnut creamer, and Hannah a Diet Pepsi. Her daughter thought she was heavy but she absolutely was not. The concern, though, did not rise to the troubling levels Parker read about on her school’s website or saw on TV regarding girls’ body image on Instagram and other social media sites.
Parker scanned the landscape. Economic downturn and the pollution in the Kenoah had stabbed the industrial heart of Ferrington. But the world no longer had use for those early twentieth-century giants, and here you could find more than a few smaller warehouses and fabricators. There’d be a long stretch of blackness, then a corrugated single-story structure would flash into sight before they plunged again into wasteland.
On the radio was a Top 40 station. The gold sedan had SiriusXM, but Parker didn’t mention this to her daughter. She stuck with FM. She knew for a fact that one could trace a car via its entertainment system, and satellite left more of a record than terrestrial. She’d learned this not from her cop husband but a true crime show.
Hannah was studying the car’s dash. Parker expected her to complain that it didn’t have as many amenities as the Toyota, which it didn’t.
But the girl surprised her by smiling and whispering, “Sweet.”
“You like it?”
The girl was looking coy. “Kind of me, you know.”
Parker smiled too. At sixteen, soon to have her driver’s license, the girl had been planting seeds about what kind of car her mother would buy her.
“What color can I get?”
It would depend on what was for sale at CarMax or Carvana or the local used car lot at a reasonable price. But, not wanting to endanger the minor détente between them, Parker said, “I’m sure it’ll come in any color you want. Short of puce. Or amaranth.”
“What?” Hannah was frowning. “That’s not real.”
“Yes, it is. Kind of red-pink. Comes from amaranth flowers.” She shot her daughter an enthusiastic look. “Oh, wait! I know! What you need is a car that’s coquelicot.”
Hannah was giggling.
“Wait!” Parker whispered, laughing herself. “Gamboge...”
“Fake, fake, fake!”
“Real, real, real!” Parker was going to say look it up but remembered, just in time, that she’d forbidden the girl from going online.
Hannah was unable to speak for the laughing and Parker’s heart was near to bursting with happiness.
They each ate a Hostess crumb donut, the particles tumbling down their chests and into their laps. After a moment, several sips later, the girl grew serious. “I’d want red or yellow. They’re hot.”
Parker didn’t know about the hot but she wouldn’t object to the hues. They were more visible at night and in bad weather.
She also knew that those two colors were more often targeted by the police than any other. A thought that led to Jon and chilled some of the joy.
It was 6:24, according to her new phone. They would stop soon, a small non-chain motel. She’d pay cash. She could have driven on to her final destination tonight — another two hours. But her plan was to make sure that her ex didn’t guess where she might be headed.
If after two days, Jon hadn’t shown up, they’d continue north, to what she was thinking of as her “safe house.”
If he hadn’t been rearrested by then.
Where was he now?
What did he happen to be thinking at this moment?
How drunk was he?
How furious was he that he hadn’t caught her at the rental house?
Don’t. Think. About. It.
And as if that were a magic incantation, an image of the seahorse appeared.
So did a taste-memory, metallic, from the blood in her mouth.
Her sobbing.
Why are you doing this to me?
The impact of the pistol cracking her cheekbone.
The—
“What?” Hannah asked.
Parker turned to her.
“You got all weird looking.”
“Nothing. Just thinking where we’ll stop for the night.”
Hannah continued to gaze at her for a moment.
The deceptions had been coming more frequently lately. Small, but a lie is a lie...
On either side of the road were forests of black trees and fields of dying grass and of corn and wheat stubble. The mile markers appeared and vanished. She thought of calculus, whose name came from the Latin word for “little pebble,” and referred to the practice in ancient Rome of using small stones to measure distances. Of all the mathematical disciplines, Allison Parker loved this one the most and she used it daily in her job.
Hannah was less animated now; she would have sensed her mother’s mood. Parker accelerated slightly along the deserted two-lane highway. The sun was gone. Clouds were low in the fragrant autumn evening and moved fast, a continuous blanket. Wind tugged leaves from branches and swirled them downward, where they swirled yet again in the vehicle’s turbulent wake.
“It’s spooky,” the girl said.
It was.
“I’m tired. How much farther?”
Allison Parker didn’t have an answer for that. All she knew was that every mile she put between the two of them and Jon Merritt felt like a gift.
23
The detective was young, with short-cut hair that clung close to his scalp, not unlike Shaw’s, though brown. He wore black slacks and a blue shirt, and a red and black tie hung down from the open collar, a look that Shaw never understood.
Dunfry Kemp’s physique was triangular and his muscled arms tested the cotton of his shirt. He’d been a wrestler, Shaw’s sport in college.
Presently on the phone, he glanced up with a blink as Shaw sat down in the only free chair. The other two were filled with paperwork. His nod of greeting was a burdened one.
Kemp’s office was on the Ferrington Police Department’s second floor, along a lengthy corridor devoted, signs explained, to Investigations and to Administration. The cubicle, though, might have been a storeroom. Stacked on his desk and against the green walls and on the brown carpet and on two-thirds of the chairs were battered folders, manila and brown accordions. Must have been two hundred. Piles of loose papers too. A whiteboard was on the wall — it was a flowchart about the investigation into the Street Cleaner serial killer, the faces of the victims.
Kemp disconnected and asked, “And it’s...?”
A woman in a blue uniform brought in two more folders. Kemp eyed them with dismay.
“Colter Shaw.”
“You work for Marty Harmon. Security?”
It was close enough.
“That’s right.”
“And this’s about...?”
Another bee buzzed into the office and deposited yet more folders. No wonder the kid was having trouble finishing sentences. A whisper: “Oh, man.”
Shaw picked up the narrative. “I’m trying to locate Jon Merritt’s wife and daughter. I understand you caught the case.”
Kemp looked at Shaw out of the corner of his eye. Nothing deceptive about this. It seemed to be just his natural angle of gaze. “Fact is, being honest, I normally wouldn’t talk to a civilian, but the captain said it’s for Mr. Harmon. And I don’t know if you know but he’s sort of saving the city.”
“The water.”
“Yessir. But fact is there is no case really. Jon just talked about hurting her.”
“Killing her,” Shaw corrected and noted that the detective had used Merritt’s given name.
“But he was lawfully discharged and didn’t commit any overt acts. That’s the key word. Overt.”
“Then you don’t know about violating the restraining order. He was at her house.”
Tapping his large fingers on a large file, he gave a tempered frown. “I heard that from her lawyer, Mr. Stein. But he couldn’t say for sure Jon was within a thousand feet of the house. And she wasn’t home.”
“So there’s no warrant?”
“No. And we don’t really do anything about violations like that. Not even sure the order’s enforceable if she wasn’t home.”
“It is,” Shaw said. He couldn’t stop himself from saying: “Is this because it’s Jon Merritt?”
His silence was a yes. But his expressed answer was to gaze around the room, inviting Shaw to join him. “Like you can see, sir. We’ve got to prioritize. I’ve got rapes and homicides and drug cases I’m running. I’ve caught part of a cold serial killer case. And an arson.”
“All accounts, Detective, he’s a sociopath. Like your serial killer. One of the cons said he talked about a murder-suicide. I hope you understand how at risk they could be.”
“I do, sir.”
Shaw said, “I called the prison. I wanted to talk to his therapist. No one’s gotten back to me.”
Kemp said, “So, they’re stonewalling because they didn’t investigate him good enough before the discharge.” He then stopped speaking, thinking he might not want to share this aloud, obvious though it was.
The huge shoulders rose and fell. “Fact is, psychiatrists won’t talk anyway. The privilege, you know.”
Shaw said, “Doctor-patient privilege fails if the patient tells the doctor he intends to hurt someone.”
“Well, I guess he hasn’t. Or we would’ve heard and that’d be in the file. Which it isn’t.”
“Would you call County?”
Kemp hesitated a moment and said he would.
Shaw wondered why he felt the urge to thank a law enforcer for merely doing his job.
“And you’ll put in paperwork for a restraining order violation warrant?”
“I’ll get to it.”
Someone approached in the corridor and Kemp looked toward his doorway with a grimace. But the officer passed on, without a look.
“And get Allison’s and Hannah’s names on a missing persons bulletin?”
Another sideways glance. “Well. How long they been missing?”
“Officer...” Shaw said nothing for a moment. “I’m trying to keep Allison and Hannah safe.”
Personalizing them by using their names. A trick he used in the reward business when speaking to reluctant witnesses.
“And I guarantee Merritt will try to kill them.”
Kemp looked at the wall of files. “Fact is, a missing persons report wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Nobody looks at it. But one thing I could do...” A nod to himself. “Put it out as flight of material witnesses.” No sideways glance now. He looked straight into Shaw’s eyes. “That’ll get some attention. Maybe. Can’t say for sure.”
“Thank you, Detective. You find them, would you call me? I don’t want them in one of your safe houses.”
He laughed. “Safe house. Yeah, right.”
A budgetary issue, Shaw supposed.
Then Shaw’s eyes dropped to the brown accordion folder. The faded white tape on the side read: Merritt. 399407.
“Can I look at that?”
Kemp hesitated. Shaw knew the request was over the line. But he just looked back into the man’s dark eyes.
One of the massive hands slid it forward.
He opened the file and flipped through the contents, which included the investigation and disposition of the aggravated battery from last year. He didn’t think there would be anything helpful in his search for the woman and girl now. He just wanted to see what had happened in the attack.
Colter Shaw was no stranger to violence. He had witnessed it, experienced it and caused it. But the pictures taken of Allison Parker’s face were tough to see. The skin had been cleaned of blood, but there were many dark brown stains on her collar and, if you looked closely, her hair. Most troubling was the damaged symmetry of her face. Merritt had slammed his service pistol into her cheek and cracked it, altering the tectonic plate of the bone.
Equally troubling were the tears, distorting the perfect lenses of her eyes.
He closed the file and pushed it back. He fished a card from his jeans pocket and handed it to the detective. It went not into a drawer but on a spot beside his computer keyboard.
He thanked Kemp again and rose, leaving him to his massive array of files.
Had the meeting been helpful or not?
His answer was: only twenty percent.
Still, sometimes the least likely approaches worked to sterling advantage. So you pursued them anyway.
Fact is.
24
No bus.
That hadn’t happened.
Jon Merritt was at a McDonald’s, the intersection of Cross County and Route 55, absently watching customers come and go.
No bus. His ex had rented a car. He was ninety-five percent positive.
Detroit, St. Louis...
Neither.
She was just like the tweaker he’d killed, coming up with a plan meant to fool everybody.
She’d bought tickets — he knew that from the clerk’s expression — and left the Toyota sort of but not really hidden, and then hiked away from the terminal to one of the nearby car rental agencies. He debated going inside but he decided he’d pushed his fake cop stuff too far. The bus clerk already might have called someone at FPD.
He had parked the truck butt-in, to have a good view of any approaching threat. This was habit. Jon Merritt had made plenty of enemies in his prior life, all the way from those in crack houses to the county building — and beyond. Enemies who would want him dead out of vengeance or, perhaps, for some other reason. Ironic, he now thought. From the early days of their marriage he’d warned Allison to be vigilant and defensive. She surely would be assuming that same attitude to evade him now.
A bite of burger, a sip of soda. Okay, think...
She’s driving. First, how far tonight, and how far tomorrow? And which direction?
It was getting late. He guessed the perimeter would be about a hundred miles from home. She’d stop somewhere in that circle.
As for direction, she’d started north; he assumed she’d keep going that way and Route 55 was the most efficient choice.
Something was in that direction, something that offered protection.
What was it?
Where would a fleeing wife flee to?
Some options came to mind.
Her friends. Likelihood? Not much. He knew most of the people she was close to. Knew too their addresses, or could easily find them. She wouldn’t put them at risk.
Her mother. Likelihood: not much. Oh, they might take 55 to I-70, then west. But Ruth was over a thousand miles away, a long and risky trek. They’d be exposed on those roads. Too easy to pull alongside and shoot through windows.
Camping out. Likelihood: so-so. As a family, they’d been to a dozen campgrounds. It wasn’t truly roughing it, but Allison knew how to put up tents and cook on camping stoves. The factor gravitating against it was Hannah. At age eight, she’d been delighted. His gut told him the sixteen-year-old that she’d become would veto the outdoors.
A motel in the boonies. Likelihood: high.
A women’s shelter. Likelihood: high. Several times, when he’d been on a bender and had trashed the house, she and Hannah had fled to one. She’d possibly do the same now. It would be a smart call. Most of them had armed guards, usually off-duty cops.
Friends of hers that he didn’t know. Likelihood: high. This would include people from the office — from which he’d been effectively banned, after several incidents.
Of the three most likely he decided the shelter and unknown friends were the best to pursue. The motel was good in theory but would be nearly impossible to find. Dom Ryan was helping but his contacts were mostly in the beehives of government. Allison would find a non-chain hotel and check in under a fake name, paying cash.
So: shelter or friends.
He ate some burger, drank some soda, debating.
Well, time was critical. He couldn’t do both. He came to a decision. He himself would try to track down any unknown friends. As for the shelter, he’d delegate that job. It was, after all, his money he was spending.
25
Moll leaned back in the driver’s seat of the Transit, watching an optical illusion, four car tires cemented at a forty-five-degree angle, revolving around a vertical pole. They seemed to spin magically.
It was hypnotic.
He and Desmond were in a strip mall parking lot a block and a half from Allison Parker’s rental house on Maple View, where they’d been for hours, after Merritt’s wife and daughter had fled.
The job was on hold as they awaited further instructions.
Which might be incoming at the moment; his phone hummed with a text. He read it, muttered, “ ’Bout time.”
“And?”
He tucked his phone away. “Merritt thinks they might’ve gone to a shelter. We’re supposed to check them out.”
“A... Oh, for battered women.”
“What were you thinking? Tornado?”
Desmond asked, “Why there?”
“She was in one. She might go back. Makes sense... Dawndue.”
The verbal tic could be cheerful. It could also be a minor obscenity.
Neither man was happy that the ex and daughter were on the road.
“That wasn’t very bright of Merritt, spooking them.”
Moll happened to be thinking to his sometimes partner: Or you could’ve gotten to my place on time, and we could have kept the ladies company at their place until Merritt arrived. He didn’t say this, though. What was the point? A moody Desmond was an irritating Desmond.
Moll went online on his iPhone and checked addresses of shelters in the city. He picked the closest one that was north of Ferrington — the direction Merritt had said they were headed. He put the Transit in gear and pulled onto the road.
Desmond was examining a willow branch, bright green, about eighteen inches long. It was fresh and damp and cut smooth at both ends. He began tapping it with the handle of his open SOG locking-blade knife.
The thonk, thonk, thonk might be a bother to some but Moll kind of liked it.
“What’s he doing?”
“Merritt? Following up some other lead.”
Thonk, thonk.
Desmond’s face foretold another gripe.
“This was supposed to be in-out, fast, and then barbecue. I was fantasizing ribs. How long’s it going to be now? I’ve got business, you know.” Desmond laundered money through a used car lot he owned. He knew what he was doing. Where else in the world were 1998 Subarus going for $250K?
Moll had projects too. While he enjoyed faux painting, his special services job found him the go-to man for disposing of bodies — ones that either he and Desmond, or other clients, had made. Presently he needed to complete an assignment involving one Edgar Barth, a potential whistleblower, who was cold and stiff and swathed in a tarp, tucked into a cabin in Ralston. The idea was that Edgar would be deposited someplace unfindable on the way to Akron, where Moll would deliver a painted settee. He’d planned on leaving late this afternoon.
But now...
His neck and hands complained and he sprayed Benadryl once more. Better.
Desmond examined the willow branch carefully. He put it down and took out his phone. Moll noted that he was looking at the texts about the job, specifically the pictures of Allison Parker and her daughter.
They had memorized what the females looked like. It made sense to be absolutely sure of your target. When you’re after woodcock you don’t want to take an out-of-season quail by mistake.
Moll noted the glint in Desmond’s eyes as he scanned the whole-body shot of Allison Parker.
The man had this habit...
Moll said, “No.”
Desmond swapped phone for willow branch. He shrugged. “A man can dream, can’t he?”
And began the thonk, thonk, thonk once more.
26
Allison Parker was looking over the unfortunate beds in unfortunate room 306 of the Sunny Acres motel, whose bold pink vacancy sign had been a beacon in the spooky night and beckoned them in for shelter.
The place was shabby and worn, the window cracked, the frame and gutters in need of paint. The view was the parking lot and a chain-link fence, whose mesh was fitted with slats to block out the view of Buddy’s Salvage.
So, it’s come to this, she thought.
“Here?” Hannah asked.
The girl’s dismay was the exact opposite of her happy reaction to the rental car.
The walls, painted white, needed another coat. Blond, scarred, tired furniture. Industrial dark blue carpet, just the shade to camouflage stains, though it was largely unsuccessful in its mission. A two-socket lamp with one bulb. Two double beds, not even queens. The scent was of musty air and powerhouse cleanser.
“It’ll do for now.”
The girl gave another exaggerated sigh.
“We’re on an adventure.”
This had once brought a smile to the girl’s face — when she was younger and the family was about to embark on a drive to the zoo, a theme park, a camping trip.
Now no such reaction.
Parker didn’t even consider mentioning Greenstone, the mythical castle of their bedtime reading pleasure. How distant were those days...
“ ‘For now’?” Hannah asked, her voice edgy. “How long is that?”
“Not long.”
Now a sigh of a different order.
They finished bringing in their bags.
Parker got the AC going. The room wasn’t that hot but she wanted to cover up the sticky noise of traffic on Route 92, trucks mostly. This she found both intrusive and, for some reason, depressing.
She was going to unpack completely. Organized to the extreme, Allison Parker always did this when she traveled, never happy living out of suitcases. But it occurred to her Hannah would deduce that “for now” might extend longer than the girl hoped.
Still, as Hannah scrolled through the basic cable stations, Parker risked scrutiny and got the toiletries assembled in the bathroom and some clothes hung in the closet. The Keurig coffee maker, on the desk, seemed in working order and there were pods that she guessed had distant expiration dates, if any. The creamer was of the powdered variety. She was stabbed by a memory — not long after she and Jon had been married and they were having his lieutenant from FPD over for dinner. She’d realized there was no milk for the cake she was going to bake. It was important to her to make a nice meal but it would have taken too long to hit the store for a quart.
Parker told Jon she had an idea — and concocted a cup of “milk” by mixing warm water and Coffee mate.
At dinner the supervisor’s wife had eaten the confection and had a second sliver. Then she had asked for the recipe, wondering aloud what made it so special. Parker and Merritt had shared a smile. “There’s a secret ingredient,” she’d said.
With this memory, she was suddenly overwhelmed and tears pricked. She glanced at Hannah to see if the girl caught it. She did not and Parker wiped fast.
For dinner: Burger King (Hannah’s the meatless selection). They heated the sandwiches and onion rings in the microwave that she thought about scrubbing but gave up worrying about.
Hannah seemed to enjoy her meal, splurging, for a change, with a vanilla milkshake.
To Parker everything was merely fuel.
U-235 came spontaneously to mind.
She gathered up the empty bags and wrappers and stuffed them in the too-small trash container.
“Go take a shower.”
“Mom...”
“And your teeth.”
“I didn’t bring any...”
Parker handed her daughter an unopened box of Crest and a sealed brush.
The girl sighed once more, but this exhalation fell into the off-the-shelf mother-daughter-nighttime-routine playbook.
All good.
The instant the door closed Parker dug through her purse and extracted a black envelope, about twelve inches by three and quite thick. It was made of a polycarbonate material and was fireproof. Even temperatures over two thousand degrees would have no effect on the contents.
When she’d cashed the check at First Federal Bank in Carter Grove after fleeing from Jon that afternoon, she had gone straight to her safety deposit box — hers alone, unknown to anyone else — and removed the envelope and stashed it in her purse. She’d taken the Coach, rather than her usual leather bag. It would be a curious choice for a simple check-cashing errand but the girl had not noticed.
A glance at the door, an ear to the shower. Then Parker lifted the Velcro-sealed flap with a loud tearing noise and pulled open the zipper. Inside were scores of documents and a thumb drive. She plugged the storage device into her laptop’s USB port and, after opening an encrypted container on her drive, selected thirty files — text and JPG photos — and copied them to the drive. When the bar hit one hundred percent, she tugged it out. She then wrote a note on the top document, jotting quickly in her careless hand. Then the papers and USB went back into the formidable envelope.
After sealing it up once more, she rose and, checking that the water was still streaming, she stepped outside and hurried to the car.
There she slipped the envelope into the glove compartment and closed it.
She returned to the room, locked the door and sat back on the bed, sipping Diet Coke. Her heart was pounding and her breath came hard. Slowly, eyes on a TV show she wasn’t watching, Allison Parker began to calm.
Much of the peace, she realized, came from her confidence that the contents of her secret envelope would be safe from fire, flood and any other disaster, except — she couldn’t help but think — nuclear ones.
27
Colter Shaw was sitting in an unoccupied office in the security division of Harmon Energy Products’ Building One.
His high-tech ergonomic chair was before a glass-topped desk, on which sat a computer, presently snoozing, and his notebook and pen. He flipped through the pages, reading his handwriting. Sonja Nilsson was playing private eye, canvassing employees who knew Parker, and she had been feeding him facts as to their possible leads, of which there were not many.
Jon Merritt, 42, ex-husband of Allison Parker, 42. Released from Trevor County Detention, early discharge. Serving 36 months for assault and battery with a deadly weapon causing grievous bodily harm. Parker told police that Merritt said he intended to murder her. As part of plea bargain, the state dropped the attempted murder charge.
Merritt was career law enforcement. Started as rookie, sixteen years ago, Vice, Street Crimes, Narcotics, promoted to detective ten years ago, working corruption and organized crime mostly. Was decorated. No complaints regarding performance until about three years ago.
After Merritt’s release, information arose that he had told other cons in County that when he was released he was going to find Allison and kill her.
Merritt has history of opioid and alcohol abuse. In the years before his arrest, police were dispatched to marital home dozens of times, no arrests made. Merritt sporadically attended various 12-step programs. Unsuccessful. Had not attended for a year prior to assault that led to his arrest.
Merritt and Parker have one child, Hannah. 16.
Allison is senior nuclear engineer at Harmon Energy Products. Has national security clearance. Invented S.I.T. trigger (prototype stolen but recovered) and a fuel rod transportation vessel, key to the company’s product, a small modular reactor, trade named the Pocket Sun.
Motive for wanting to kill Allison unknown. Possibly revenge. Possibly worried that she knew things about him he wouldn’t want brought to light. Might have been motive for initial assault in November of last year. No one interviewed knew what these facts might be.
Merritt characterized as classic sociopath. Charming and highly functioning on one side, rageful and homicidal on the other.
Discharge order invalidated and warrant issued for his arrest for violation of restraining order by trespassing on her property today. Ferrington PD considers this a minor infraction, and is not aggressively investigating, due to workforce shortage and Merritt’s past favorable history in the department.
Merritt’s name and the make and tag of his vehicle are on the countywide wire. He drives a white Ford F-150 pickup, tag JKT345. Unknown if he has other vehicle.
Merritt’s whereabouts not known.
Her lawyer, David Stein, does not know where Allison and Hannah are.
Emails to Marty Harmon and Ruth Parker, her mother, sent from her phone, give no indication of where she might be going.
Profile of Allison Parker re: possible whereabouts.
◦ Generally prefers inland, that is, camping, to beaches. Has rudimentary outdoor skills, sufficient for survival in temperate weather like at present.
◦ No physical conditions affecting travel (true for daughter too).
◦ In good health, athletic, swimmer.
◦ Driving a gray Toyota 4Runner, tag RTD478.
◦ Probably unarmed.
Ferrington PD detective Dunfry Kemp is running the investigation but is making little effort to find Merritt. His name and vehicle are on countywide wire. So are Allison and Hannah. No field detectives assigned to a search for either.
All of Allison’s and Hannah’s known social media sites closed down. Allison’s phone is no longer active. Email accounts might be active, but she’s not responding to messages sent by Harmon or her mother.
Sonja Nilsson interviewing Alli Parker’s coworkers. None have suggested where she might have gone. Still more subjects to contact. Parker has no relatives in the area.
Jon Merritt’s mother lives in Kansas; father is deceased. Mother reported that she’s heard nothing from her son or Alli Parker, with whom she was on terms that were friendly, if distant.
He read through his notes twice. It was enough background.
The Restless Man was restless.
Shaw rose and walked to Sonja Nilsson’s office. She was on the second of her two phones, the off-brand one. Her conversation seemed serious.
She looked up.
He told her, “Going out. Back in an hour or two.”
She nodded and turned her full attention back to the call.
Shaw fished the motorcycle keys from his pocket and walked to the elevator, past some colorful renderings of Pocket Suns. Bright yellow lines radiated outward from the dome of the units, reminding Shaw of nothing so much as the beams emanating from the heads of Christian martyrs in medieval paintings as they were about to meet their ends.
28
He parked on Cross County again — no risk of her deflating any tires now — and made his way along the same route he’d taken earlier in the day, through the woods behind her house.
Jon Merritt assessed the place: Nice enough. Small. A pool, of course. She had to have her pool.
He pictured the seahorse...
The snow...
Spattered with her crimson blood.
Then he dumped the memories and slipped up to the back door.
The lucky SOB got lucky once again.
His ex and daughter had left so fast they’d forgotten to lock the door and set the alarm. The light on the unit glowed green. He stepped inside. He was going to go from room to room to close the drapes but his wife had conveniently done so. Still paranoid, it seemed.
Cartons sat stacked in neat rows against the wall, each one carefully labeled — unlike at the U-Store facility, where she’d tossed things into the containers helter-skelter. A third bedroom was packed floor to crown molding with boxes and racks of clothing.
She’d unpacked only the necessities. Where was she planning on moving permanently? Out into the country? Another state? Her job was important to her but there were other miniature reactor companies. Some had tried to steal her away, he recalled.
Sparse, yes, a residence for a transitional life. Still, she’d built some comfort; the house was homey lite. Cut flowers, real ones, exploded from a half-dozen clear glass vases. Macy’s oriental rugs covered the laminate floors. Pictures on the walls. Every relative was represented but him. She’d done what the Soviet dictators did. Purge.
The ransacking began.
His ex’s bedroom was also her office.
Her laptop was gone, and her desktop locked. He found an old phone that he remembered, a Nokia flip. He recalled it was her second phone — and one she hadn’t told him about — because it was for work, she claimed. One morning a year and a half ago, he woke up, still drunk, alone in their bed and found that he’d thrown the mobile across the room. The device was unharmed. The mirror was shattered. He powered it on now; it was no longer active.
Squatting, Merritt began rifling through her desk, pulling out drawers and dumping the contents on the floor. Looking for diaries, notebooks, address books, envelopes with handwritten return addresses, business and greeting cards, receipts, Post-it notes, bills, credit card statements, flyers...
Jon Merritt knew very well that a case might be closed thanks to the smallest of jottings. If he found something that might be helpful he didn’t read it carefully now but shoved it into his backpack; he didn’t want to spend any more time here than was necessary. A police visit was unlikely but not impossible.
Digging, digging, sorting, discarding, stuffing...
God, there was a lot of crap, much of it for work: schematics, diagrams, spreadsheets and long, complicated reports. He didn’t remember her bringing home this much when they lived together. There was a policy against taking most documents out of the office.
Once the desk was depleted, it was on to the bedside tables, the dresser, vanity, closets. A search of those yielded only marginal prizes. In the end he hefted the backpack onto his shoulder and estimated he’d collected a good five or six pounds of Allison Parker’s Personal Life.
Now on to his daughter’s room, though he didn’t think he’d have much luck there. For one thing, it would be his ex who had their destination in mind, not Hannah. Also, a typical teen, the girl kept her existence mostly digital. No diary, no address book, no Post-its. Some doodlings on class assignments. A pink scrap of torn paper that said Kyle is crushing on you. I am serious!! There were two other references to the kid, who Merritt had never heard of.
Were Kyle’s parents among those unknown friends they might stay with?
Merritt was flipping through a thick stack of poetry, photos and school assignments when he heard the rattle of a motorcycle outside. The engine gunned and stopped. He stuffed the papers into his backpack and peered out.
In the front yard was a trim man, in his thirties, resting a helmet on the seat of a Yamaha dirt bike. He was in a brown leather jacket, black jeans and black shoes. The jacket wasn’t zipped and Merritt believe he saw the butt of a pistol on his right hip, back and low. It was nestled in a gray inside-the-belt holster.
Who the hell was this?
Jon Merritt walked to the kitchen, opened the garage door and stepped inside, drawing his own weapon.
A two-hundred-dollar gun that had cost seven.
29
Following the agreeable voice of the GPS girl, Moll pulled into the parking lot in front of the one-story building. It was white clapboard, with black-trim windows.
The modest sign above the door read:
This was the third women’s shelter on the list. Allison Parker had had no connection with the one north of the city — which had been the most likely one, given the direction of her flight. The second was in Bakersville, the seediest part of Ferrington, and no one there knew Allison.
“Better be it.” Moll snagged an envelope, 8½ by 11, white. And stepped out of the Transit.
He was almost certain Allison Parker and her daughter weren’t here, since it was south of Ferrington. But she might’ve headed north, then circled back. Merritt had said she’d definitely spent some time in one of the shelters, and Moll’s hope was to find somebody she had become friendly with, somebody she might have spoken to after she fled. Maybe they’d even recommended another shelter in a different county. Nothing wrong with putting some miles between her and any threat.
Moll pushed the intercom button.
“Yes?” A woman’s voice floated out from the speaker below the camera. She seemed stern.
“Hi, delivery.” Moll was as professional as he could be. He held up the envelope. “Need a signature.”
The probing eye would see a man in a suit and tie. A white man. Made a difference, sad to say. The door lock buzzed, and he entered, thinking: careless of them.
The front office was paneled with cheap wood and was obviously a DIY job, with mispatched alignment and sloppy joints. Behind a scuffed desk sat a woman of around thirty-five in a white blouse and dark skirt. She had long brunette hair, ponytail strangled by two scrunchies or whatever they were called. One near her head and the other near the end of the tail.
She was not alone. A large dark-skinned man, wearing a security guard’s blue uniform, sat in the corner. He eyed Moll and went back to texting. He was armed.
With as pleasant an expression as a hulk of a man can muster, Moll displayed the envelope on which a label was pasted. He said, “Copy of a revised restraining order for Ms. Allison Parker.” He was going to pretend to hesitate and look at the name on the envelope. But that might be overacting. “The sheriff’s out serving Merritt now. If he can find him.”
“Allison?”
Moll’s bad day improved considerably with this. She hadn’t asked, “Who?” She knew Merritt’s ex.
“That’s right. She’s in residence here, isn’t she?”
The woman was then frowning as she glanced at the envelope, maybe expecting him to show her the contents, which wasn’t going to happen, since they were ten sheets of blank computer printer paper. Her response was “No.”
Moll now took on the same confused expression she was projecting. “The clerk of the court said she was in a shelter. I just assumed it was this one, since the paperwork said she was here before.”
“That’s right. But she’s not now. You better check with the magistrate’s office.”
“Has she talked to you recently about possibly coming in?”
It was not a question a process server would ask. She looked him over. Was there suspicion?
“Can I ask, why didn’t you just call first?”
Good question.
A shrug. “I was in the area on another delivery. Thanks for your help. You have a good evening now.”
The woman nodded and, fortunately for Moll, turned back to the screen, which gave him the chance to memorize her chest. For future reference.
Desmond had a problem. Moll had control. But he was, after all, a man.
Outside, he climbed into the driver’s seat. “The receptionist? She knows her.”
“Did she say anything we can use?”
Moll said, “Not yet. She will.”
30
Colter Shaw’s father, Ashton, had a rule: Never break the law.
Though the final word in that sentence was subject to some interpretation.
There were laws and then there were laws, and occasionally survival required you to redefine the concept of legal prohibitions.
You could also get good mileage out of the concept of affirmative defense: Your Honor, yes, I broke the law, but I did it to save a life. Nearly-a-lawyer Shaw had become very familiar with this concept in the reward business.
So he didn’t think twice about pushing open the unlocked back door of Allison Parker’s rental house on Maple View.
Besides, if the cops weren’t energized enough to track down an intended wife-killer, Shaw’s crime of trespass would not appear as the faintest blip on their radar.
He stepped into the dark kitchen and remained still, hand on his pistol, scanning what he could see from here: dining area, a portion of the living room, the pantry.
Listening.
The creaks of a settling house. The tap of branches and skittering of leaves; the breeze had picked up.
He needed light, but not until he cleared the small one-story house.
Room by room.
Shaw, who’d drawn his pistol, moved through the kitchen, the living room, a tiny bedroom in the back, a large bedroom in the front of the house and a smaller one across the hall. Bathrooms, clear. Closets, clear. No basement to search.
This left only the garage, the door to which was in the kitchen.
Instinct told him to crouch as he pulled the door open and lifted his gun.
He found himself aiming at a shadowy space, filled with sealed boxes and furniture and other items awaiting their final home.
No movement.
He needed to check behind the cartons, a good hiding space, if Merritt was in fact here. The odds were that he was not, but the consequence if that slim chance proved to be the case would not be good.
Shaw could only search behind the boxes by walking around the stacks.
Making him a perfect target.
And so he picked another option: with his left hand he shoved the top row of cartons into the space behind them, keeping the Glock pointed toward where an attacker would emerge.
One by one, they fell with varying types and levels of noise. China and glassware were not his priorities, but nothing seemed to shatter.
This took less than a minute. He circled around and confirmed no one was here.
When he finished, he returned to the kitchen, locked the door and began turning on lights. He walked from room to room, looking for anything that might tell him where Allison had gone.
It didn’t take long to see that this would probably be futile. The bedroom in the back was empty, except for a few storage boxes, which were sealed. As for the other two, it looked like a tornado had swept through them. Of course they’d been in a hurry to leave, but this was not the result of fast, careless packing. The rooms had been tossed, and by somebody who knew what they were doing — an ex-cop, for instance. Drawers had been removed and inverted, as Merritt would have looked for anything taped underneath. The contents of the desk, dresser and bedside tables were in different piles on the carpeted floor. Shaw could just about tell where Merritt had sat to sort through what he’d gathered.
The same was true about the daughter’s room.
Anything helpful would be gone.
He doused the lights and stepped outside, then walked to a neighbor’s house. The home was dark, except for one interior light, dim, and he was not surprised there was no answer when he rang the bell. The residence on the other side was well lit and occupied. The woman who answered nodded pleasantly to a smiling Shaw — his expression of choice for getting information from strangers. He told her he was a friend of Allison’s mother’s, a not wholly deceptive statement, and had some things to give her. She was supposed to be home but she wasn’t answering the door.
“You know when they’ll be back?”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you. I haven’t seen them today. Matter of fact, they keep to themselves mostly. The mother and girl. Always seemed suspicious. Not social at all. I left cupcakes, and she mailed me a note. I thought she’d come over in person.”
Shaw thanked her and returned to the street in front of the house and walked to the intersection of Maple View and Cross County, a four-lane thoroughfare. Sitting on the sidewalk in the middle of the block was a man in dusty rumpled clothing. A sign beside him informed passersby he was out of work and a veteran.
Shaw approached. He dropped a ten into a cardboard box, in which sat a few coins.
“Bless you.” Spoken with an understandable hint of wariness, since Shaw was not walking on after the donation.
“Got a question.” He displayed pictures of Allison and Hannah on his phone. “These two, they’re missing. You seen them today?”
He frowned, tilted his head.
A twenty made its way into the box.
“Yeah, they left, fast, was hours ago. Her SUV ran the stop sign. A driver gave her the finger. She just kept going fast, till she got to the truck.”
“What truck?”
“White pickup. Was about there.” He pointed.
“Ford F-150?”
He shrugged.
“You said she stopped?”
The man chuckled. “Yep. Let the air out of a tire. Then kept going. Bat outta hell.”
There were skid marks where she’d gunned the engine.
“How soon after she left did the driver of the truck come back?”
“Oh, right after. Dangerous-looking guy. Pale, spooky. Ghoulish. Don’t hear that word much, do you?”
Shaw pulled out his phone and showed a mug shot of Merritt.
“Yeah, him.”
“What’d he do after he got the spare on?”
“Drove off after her.”
“You have a phone?”
“I got a phone.”
Shaw dug into his pocket and peeled off a hundred in twenties. Into the box they went.
“My, oh, my.”
Shaw also dropped a card with his burner numbers on it; only that, no name. “Give me your number.”
He glanced up cautiously. “You gonna sell it to a telemarketer?” Then grinned. He recited the number and Shaw loaded it into his phone.
“You see that white pickup around the house, call me.”
“I will.”
Shaw turned to leave.
“But he won’t be back.”
Facing the man again. “How do you know?”
“You spooked him good.”
“What do you mean?”
“You pull up on that motorcycle of yours and not three minutes later he’s climbing out that window.” He pointed to the garage. “He runs to the pickup and, this time, goes east.” Tugging a lengthy eyebrow. “Can I still have the hundred?”
Shaw sprinted to the Yamaha, fired up the engine and skidded into the street.
Two miles later, having passed scores of arteries major and arteries minor, which would have taken Merritt anywhere through the warren that was this part of Ferrington, he braked sharply to a stop, lifted his phone and composed a text to Sonja Nilsson.
Just before he hit send he received one.
From her.
Both messages said largely the same thing.
31
Jon Merritt parked the F-150 in one of the many vacant lots near the river, off Manufacturers Row.
There had been no point in engaging the guy on the motorcycle.
Muscle.
But working for who?
A big question. But he didn’t waste time speculating. He had to move. So far his only crimes — known crimes — were violating a restraining order and trespassing. Soon this would change, of course, and even the Hero of Beacon Hill would no longer be immune from pursuit.
But for now, he had a certain period of grace.
He climbed from the truck’s cab. Some crack and meth heads, scrawny men and a few women, sat or stood on the riverwalk, eyeing him. They were twitchy and desperate and hoping he could hook them up. Or, if not, he might have something they could relieve him of, which in turn they could barter for a hit. Two men rose unsteadily and approached. He displayed the gun and they turned and vanished, as if the wind had blown them on their way. Just like the bum at the bus depot.
People like these were mosquitoes. All it took was a slap, and they were gone.
Merritt walked west toward the Fourth Street Bridge. The city’s paint jobs had been haphazard, both the original sickly green and more recent darker versions of a similar hue. Much rust too. He crossed on the sidewalk, which was edged with a ten-foot chain-link barrier. The fencing had been added some years ago after the bridge had become a popular site for suicides. This was curious since the distance from bridge to water was about fifty feet. You couldn’t work up lethal velocity in that distance. The deaths — mostly laid-off workers — came from drowning.
Merritt had run some of these cases as a rookie. He thought if he ever wanted to take his life it would be by firearm, not the suffocation of drowning, especially in this toxic soup.
The autumn moon was a disk camouflaged by haze — some smoke, some pollution. This was Ferrington. Better than when Merritt was a teenager, his father working in one of the plants that spewed whatever it was the towers spewed. He’d heard it was just heated air; the poisons were treated into nothingness within the factory. That was a lie, of course.
Across the river was a faded billboard.
Beneath the slogan was painted a parade of industrial items. Merritt had no idea what exactly they were. Metal parts, tubes, tanks, boxes, controllers. Ferrington was not known for consumer products.
Merritt came to a commercial strip on Fourth, most of the offices dark, but he passed a storefront that was still inhabited. He stepped into an alleyway across the street and checked his gun. Soon this office too went dark. A short man in his forties but with prematurely gray hair stepped outside. He was in a suit and a short overcoat and carrying a briefcase. He locked the door and walked north, his gait a waddle. Merritt stepped from the alley and followed, twenty feet behind him.
They covered a block in tandem, when he heard a car bleat and saw the lights flash their brief inanimate welcome. Merritt moved in quickly.
The man climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Before he started the engine, Merritt approached and rapped on the window. He stood tall so his face wasn’t visible and held his police ID against the glass.
The window came down.
“Officer, can I—”
Instantly Merritt reached in, pressed the passenger-side lock and ripped the door open, pulling out his pistol. He dropped into the seat and swung the gun into the face of David Stein, Allison’s lawyer.
The man’s shoulders slumped and he shook his head. “Jon, Christ.”
“Shh.” Merritt rolled the window up.
“What’s this getting you? Just a shitload of trouble. I never did anything to you.”
Merritt shivered in rage at those words.
Stein backed down. “I’m sorry, Jon. I was just doing—”
“Shh.” Merritt pulled on his seatbelt. He said, “Keep yours off, start the car and drive where I tell you.”
“Jon—”
“Straight. Left on Monroe.”
Grimacing in disgust, the lawyer did as told.
Merritt cocked the gun, drawing a gasp from the lawyer, and rested the muzzle against his neck.
This message was: Drive slowly. He didn’t need to add that the road surfaces of Ferrington were in such sad shape that any kind of heroic maneuver would in all likelihood not end well for him.
32
At 11 p.m....
The receptionist stepped out the front door of the Safe Away shelter.
The dark-haired woman was slimmer than Moll remembered, though just as top heavy. He could tell because her black leather jacket was close-fitting.
She walked away from the door and lit a cigarette, the smoke vanishing fast on this cool windy night. Hiking a gym bag higher on her shoulder she made a cell phone call and had a conversation.
There were four cars parked in the lot. Moll wondered which was hers. He hoped it was the white Camry, easier to follow.
The plan was simple. They’d force her off the road, grab her, and get her into the Transit. Then they’d park in the shadows and get to work. Did she know where Allison Parker had gone?
She’d say either yes or no.
Moll could tell if she was being honest, either way.
“Would you hang up the damn phone and move,” Desmond muttered, eyes on her.
They couldn’t do anything until she got to her car and left.
The woman just puffed and talked, puffed and talked.
“Check out her—”
“—belt,” Moll said. “I saw it.”
The reference was to a canister of pepper spray.
Victims fighting back was always a risk, ranging from karate to spray to firearms, but never insurmountable. Just something you took into account and handled.
The woman nodded and swayed, as if ending a conversation and mentally moving on from the caller.
At last.
Then Desmond stiffened. “Shit.”
He’d been looking in the side-view mirror. Moll did the same and saw the cruiser — a county deputy’s vehicle — moving slowly toward the Transit.
Both men instinctively slipped the guns into compartments under the front seats. They looked like built-in DVD players. Moll had made them himself.
Moll and Desmond remained calm. They hadn’t been drinking and there was no evident blood on the bed of the van. Luminol would reveal some traces of Edgar’s blood, but using those fancy lights would require a warrant or probable cause.
They’d pulled over simply to make a phone call and send some texts. Distracted driving is one of the leading causes of traffic deaths, I heard, Officer. My friend and I are always careful.
But the car cruised past, the deputy paying them no mind. He pulled up to the front of the clinic, and the receptionist disconnected her call, ground out the cigarette and climbed into the front seat. She and the deputy exchanged a ten-years-married kiss.
The man put the car in gear and they drove off.
“Well.” Moll grunted. He sent a text delivering the bad news. Tonight, at least, the shelter was a dead end. He tucked the phone away.
They retrieved their guns.
Moll pulled slowly onto the state route and headed back toward his house in Ferrington.
Desmond pulled out the willow branch and began fiddling with it, tapping it again with his black knife.
Moll thought about poor Edgar, becoming less human every hour. He had to get to Ralston and take care of it. By now it would be VapoRub in the nose to handle the stench. Though the sawing would be easier.
Tomorrow. Please tomorrow. Let’s get this finished.
He was tired... and hungry. Chain burgers, not fine barbecue, had figured in the day’s calories.
Desmond was sighting down the branch. “You had no problem with the banker’s wife.”
This again?
“No, the job is a hit. Pure and simple. Your dick cannot figure in this picture. And that wife? You got to her before I even knew what you were up to. And we had to burn the cabin after. For the evidence.”
Thonk, thonk, thonk... More pounding on the willow branch. This part of the project took a long time, Moll knew.
Moll looked Desmond over. “You do understand that just by sitting there, you’ve left enough clues to earn a one-way ticket to Harper Maximum. Imagine what you’d leave if you unzipped.”
Desmond tilted his head, reflecting. “Rest assured, friend, I will refrain from having carnal knowledge with the vehicle. Tempted though I am.”
The man could occasionally display a sense of humor.
“Go to one of your truck stops.”
Desmond scoffed. “There? Half those girls didn’t start life as Betty or Sally.”
“What do you care who you put it in?”
“I’m just saying.”
Where the hell did the man get his hormones?
An incoming text. Moll read it, glancing between the screen and the road.
“Merritt had a talk with her lawyer. It did not pan out.”
“Shit. That could’ve been a good lead.”
Desmond seemed to get tired of playing with the branch. He put it away, the knife too. “What about that guy, Motorcycle Man?”
“What about him?”
“I mean, he’s got a gun, he breaks into her house. Who knows what he’ll do?”
Moll considered this. “The way I look at it: he is both helpful and a problem.”
“Uh-huh.” Desmond’s I’m-not-in-the-mood look emerged. “And that means what?”
“If he leads us to her, that is helpful. Once he does, then he is a problem.”
33
At 11 p.m....
Allison Parker was standing at the window of Sunny Acres, lifting aside the curtain to gaze at Route 92.
She wondered why she bothered to do this. How could she possibly identify a threat? The headlights that zipped past could belong to a station wagon driven by a nun on her way to a nun convention. Or to a Ford F-150, driven by a man who used his superpowers to find her, against all odds.
Then he would park, suss out the room they were in and...
Stop it, she told herself.
And began the mantra. Don’t. Think. About. It.
Hannah had grown moody once more. She was staring at her computer screen, typing fast. Her silence was like a splinter, black, deep in the skin.
“You have to stay in airplane mode,” Parker said. There was no way to shut off internet service in only one room. She’d asked the clerk.
The girl snapped, “I am. Want to see?” She was angry.
“No, honey. I believe you.”
Five more minutes of silence, then Hannah closed the lid of the laptop and set it on the nightstand. Saying nothing, she pulled her sweatpants off. She wore navy-blue boxers underneath. The girl climbed under the comforter and rolled onto her side, away from her mother.
Parker sat in the motel’s excuse for an office chair and closed her eyes. After five minutes she roused herself to stand and walked into the bathroom and tended to her nighttime routine. She looked out the window once more. A glance toward the golden Kia, holding its magic envelope. Then she shut the light out and she too lay down in bed, tugging the sheet and blanket around her.
Listening to the now sporadic traffic.
Nuns?
Or her ex?
More memories. These of her daughter.
Hannah at five. Disney for the first time, the Florida palms swaying, the heat, the 4 p.m. downpour, lasting exactly fifteen minutes. Goofy scared her to tears.
At seven, her face glowing as she sat under the Christmas tree and ripped open the package containing the American Girl doll.
At ten, returning shyly from school, clutching an envelope from the principal. As the girl ate her after-school snack of mozzarella sticks and Goldfish, Parker tore it open, worried that her daughter had gotten into trouble. Later that night, she and Jon framed the Certificate of Mathematics Achievement, for getting the highest score in the history of Benjamin Harris School.
At twelve, her face glowing as she sat under the Christmas tree and ripped open the BB gun her father had bought and wrapped himself. Parker was unsure about the gift, which Jon hadn’t told her about. Still, she smiled at Hannah’s happy enthusiasm as the girl plinked away at empty Sprite cans that tumbled into the snow, where they lay green and contrasty in the monotone December morn.
At thirteen, asking her mother about girls kissing girls. Casually. Like she was asking: Would it rain today? Her carefully constructed answer, which had been composed about a year earlier, was simple and contained not a hint of judgment. A month later the girl was “dating,” that is, hanging with, none other than Luke Shepherd, yes, that’s the one, the school’s star quarterback.
At fourteen, watching with cautious eyes her father weaving through the living room, stumbling over a chair and struggling to get up.
At fifteen, racked by uncontrolled sobs, flinging herself at her parents as Jon, inches from Parker’s face, screamed obscenities and accusations. He was numb to his daughter’s grip, trying to pull him away. Oblivious too to his wife’s cries of “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
And then, November of last year, sitting on her bed, lost in texting and whatever music was coursing loudly and directly into her brain through the Beats headphones, while the bloody drama unfolded under the seahorse outside.
Sleep wasn’t happening. Parker rolled onto her back, staring at the popcorned ceiling. A faint pink glow from the sign out front made it into the room. She wished she could shut it off, superstitiously thinking it might somehow tell Jon Merritt where they were.
Motion from the other bed. Hannah had stirred. She was sleeping the way she used to when she and Jon would check in during the night: on her side, hugging a second pillow.
“Love you, Han.”
A moment later, she heard the girl’s voice. Though distorted, layered into the girl’s soft breathing and muted by institutional cotton, the words could very well have been a reciprocating “Love you too.”
For the next fifteen minutes, until sleep unspooled within her, she tried to analyze the meaning — not of the words themselves, if they were in fact what she hoped — but of the tone with which her daughter had spoken them: sincere, a space filler, an obligation, an attempt to keep an enemy at bay, sardonic? Allison Parker, the engineer mother, approached this question as if she were facing a mathematical problem that was aggressively difficult, involving limits and sine waves and integrals and differentials and sequences and variables...
But her analytical skills failed her, and the only conclusion she could draw was that the calculus of the heart was both infinitely complex and absurdly simple and, therefore, wholly insoluble.
34
At 11 p.m....
Jon Merritt was sitting propped up in bed.
Outside, he heard the lonesome horn of a tug pulling or pushing barges on the Kenoah.
Beside him were the whisky bottle, a soda can, the remains of one of the sandwiches from earlier and hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of intelligence that he’d collected from his ex’s home.
He was angry.
The lawyer had been unhelpful, tearfully reporting that he knew nothing about her whereabouts. In the end, Merritt believed him.
Under other circumstances he might have felt bad for what happened to the unfortunate man — and what his family would be going through. Not tonight.
No luck with Attorney Stein.
No luck at the women’s shelters either.
So, it was down to doing what detectives did: excavating.
Post-its, scraps of paper, cards, clippings, annotated pages ripped from engineering journals, reports about Hannah from teachers.
His only hope at this point was to find that person who was a friend of his wife’s but a stranger to him.
Nothing, nothing, nothing...
He downed the contents of the plastic glass, so thin it nearly cracked under his grip. He poured some more. He drank.
Back to the task...
Slips of paper passed under his bleary eyes on their way to the discard pile.
This put him in mind of running his big corruption case. Poring over page after page of financial documents, real estate, corporate contracts and filings, checks, accounting books, Excel spreadsheets, and so much more.
And then...
At last he had found a gold nugget. No, platinum. The lead that took him to Beacon Hill, and to what he’d found hidden in the sewer pipe that went nowhere.
And eventually what happened after.
He sipped from the fragile glass.
His eyes closed.
The smell.
It’s tuna, Merritt has recognized. His sessions with Dr. Evans are at 1 p.m. and he supposes that a tuna salad sandwich is what the shrink looks forward to at lunch: an oasis in the desert of dangerous crazies.
Today the doctor is wearing two hats: shrink plus vocation counsellor. “You’ll need to get into a program when you’re out.”
“Oh, I will. I’ll probably be in one forever. I like them.” Jon the Charmer is back. Always when in the shrink’s room.
“And then a job. You won’t be able to be a policeman anymore.”
The reminder, obvious, infuriates him. He says in an enthusiastic voice, though, “I’ve been thinking about that, Doctor. I’ve got a lot of options.”
“I’ve seen reports from the staff. They’ve said your work in the metal shop is exemplary...” He then pauses, perhaps thinking that the big word is too much for a con.
Merritt had graduated from college before the academy but gives no clue as to the resentful anger. “I enjoy working with my hands. It’s kind of a gift. You?” He puts on a face of genuine curiosity.
“No.” The doctor doesn’t like to answer questions about his life outside the four corners.
“I put myself through college working the line at Henderson Fabrications.”
One of the few companies on Manufacturers Row still operating, if not thriving.
Dr. Evans stares at the tablet. Merritt isn’t sure if he’s reading it or not. Zoning out seems to be a mainstay of his practice. He can be counted on to do this several times a session.
Obsessively wrestling with his prisoner-patients’ mental health?
Daydreaming of the cares of housewives?
Or thinking of tuna sandwiches?
He flutters back to this dimension and looks at Merritt. “The report I got, Jon. That con from C. He jumped you. You didn’t fight back.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to do that, Doctor.” A laugh. “Nothing good would come of it. That’d be a sure way to really get my ass kicked.”
Oh, it was close. For an instant Merritt was seared by the rage. And though he isn’t a big man any longer, he could still have snapped the neck of the wiry tweaker, crazed because he couldn’t get product and somehow, in his decayed mind, associating Merritt with that absence.
But he’d stepped back and taken the blows.
What choice was there? He wanted to get out. Fighting would keep him in.
So he dropped to the wet concrete and covered his head. He could take a beating like a man—
Take the blows.
Take the belt.
The belt...
And suddenly, he’s surprised to realize that just this once he doesn’t want to deceive the doctor. “Hey, you know, there’s something I’m thinking of. This time I was nineteen.”
The doctor is looking his way, nodding.
“I was working overtime for money for school and I got home after second shift and my father had this tantrum. He thought I’d been out, crowning around. That’s what he called it when you screwed around with girls, smoking, having a beer. ‘Crowning.’ I told him I put in for overtime. For the shift differential. But he didn’t believe me. And, okay, I’m nineteen, remember? He stands up and starts to take his belt off and—”
“Oh, say, Jon. I see our time is up. That sounds like something we should explore.” He flips the tablet screen, queuing up the next hopeless patient.
Merritt is furious. His anger is fundamental. In his soul. But he lets it go and smiles and says, “Sure thing, Doctor. See you next week.”
And as he leaves he’s thinking it was probably a good idea to end it there. If he’d continued down that road the façade of charm might have cracked and certain facts might have spilled out.
Among them the capital-T Truth: that the agreeable patient with the 1 p.m. slot is in fact a murderer. And he’s not talking attempt. The real thing.
Now, in a cell of a different sort, the River View Motel, Jon Merritt shut the light out, nearly knocking the flimsy thing over. He set the alarm on his phone and lay back in bed. Not washing up, not peeing, not brushing his teeth.
All he was thinking at the moment was that he hoped to hear another cry of horn from a tug or a riverboat. It was something superstitious. The more horns, the luckier the lucky man would be.
Over the next few minutes he collected two, one loud, one barely audible, and then sleep took him.
35
At 11 p.m....
Colter Shaw was back in another windowless office within the security department of Harmon Energy Products.
He was not alone. Sonja Nilsson sat beside him at a long desk on which were dozens of computer monitors and keyboards.
Shaw was on the phone with Detective Dunfry Kemp.
Never antagonize law enforcers...
But it was hard to keep the frustration from his voice. “Well, Detective, all respect. Now it’s overt. He was inside the house. He tossed it, looking for where Allison’s gone.”
“You saw him?”
“I saw the mess he made. And a homeless man saw him leave. I’ve got the number.”
“A homeless man has a phone?”
“You want it?”
A pause. “And you were in the house yourself, Mr. Shaw?”
“State Penal Code 224.655. It’s an affirmative defense when one enters upon a premises without permission to save the life of others.”
“You looked that up.”
“I did.”
“Before or after you broke in? Never mind.”
“Detective, this takes it up a notch. Gets some gold shields assigned.”
Or maybe puts it on the desk of somebody who’s not too lazy to do it?
No, that was unfair, given the walls of files. Still...
Nilsson was looking at him. He shook his head.
Shaw remained silent. There was no better prod than this. Quiet beats repeating the question a dozen times for getting a response. “Fact is, it’s still a misdemeanor.”
Again, not a word.
A sigh. “I’ll get it to the powers that be.”
He inhaled long. “Anything you can do, Detective. Much appreciated.”
He disconnected.
“Almost useless,” he muttered. “It’s like Merritt’s walking around in body armor.”
“So, back to the digital legwork,” Nilsson said.
Her text message, the one that he had read when he pulled over on Cross County Highway, had said:
No luck here. Let’s check cams.
The one he’d been about to send:
Too many haystacks. Can we get intersection camera access?
Nilsson explained that the city of Ferrington might be down a number of human law enforcers but in some compensation city hall had invested in an above-average municipal video surveillance system.
“Not inexpensive, but cheaper than bodies and no insurance or pension payments.”
The system was enhanced by access to some private cameras — in retail stores and service stations whose owners volunteered them.
Being the famed benefactor of the city, Harmon made calls and had gotten the okay for Nilsson, and therefore Shaw, to log in to the consolidated system.
This room contained dozens of monitors and they were now searching footage for Allison Parker’s Toyota 4Runner and her ex-husband’s Ford F-150 pickup.
They had started with the fact she fled west on Cross County Highway.
Shaw had called up a map of North Ferrington. Nilsson leaned close, beside him. He detected a flowery scent. Then concentrated again on the grid. Cross County was intersected by many streets and roads. But near Ferrington, they were closed neighborhoods with no way out.
She gestured toward it. “Maybe she knows someone there.”
“Possible. Ten percent, I’d say. I think she’ll keep going. Put as much distance between Ferrington and herself as possible.”
“Agreed.”
They’d then sat down, where they were now, and had begun to review footage along Cross County starting from the approximate time she would have fled.
Shaw believed he had a hit of a 4Runner, the color of hers, turning south on 55. There was a truck behind the turning vehicle, though, partially obscuring the view. The tag was not visible at all.
Nilsson peered at the images. “Could be. Anybody inside you can see?”
No. Glare and grain.
Shaw switched to cameras along 55 south, while Nilsson continued to scan for Merritt’s pickup, both west — the first time he’d fled her house — and east, after he’d escaped during Shaw’s visit.
“May have her,” he said.
About a half hour after she’d turned south, a 4Runner pulled quickly from a shopping center parking lot and sped north on 55. If it had been hers that they’d seen turning south, she’d been in Carter Grove briefly. When the vehicle arrived at Cross County, it kept going north. “It’s her.” The intersection camera had caught a clear image of her tag. “Where would that take her, going that way?”
“Chicago; Detroit; Indianapolis; International Falls; Red Lake, Ontario, where I used to fish with my father. Look at this.”
Shaw eased close to her, their shoulders brushing, like they had at the failed attempt to have lunch. She was playing video from the camera closer to downtown, pointed west on Cross County. It was capturing a cityscape, stores, apartments, a car repair garage. A white pickup was driving toward the camera. The time stamp indicated it was not long after Merritt’s second visit to the rental. It turned right, south, and vanished. She rewound it.
“If this were a sci-fi movie,” she offered, “I’d say, ‘Enhance, enhance,’ and we’d get the make, model and eye color of the driver.”
Interesting she said that. And he wondered again about the green hue.
“It’s definitely a 150,” he said.
“Yes, but is it his?” Nilsson wondered. This state did not require a front license plate.
“The street he turned on?”
“Miller. Leads downtown.” She sighed. “It’s a warren. We’d need a dozen sets of eyes and two or three solid days to scan them all.”
“Let’s focus on finding Allison and Hannah. She’s headed north on Fifty-five. Cameras there?”
She looked over a list the FPD had provided. “No city or county ones past Cross County. Some private ones.” Her long fingers, nails dark, typed fast. “Six we can access. We have to log on. Here’s the IPs and passwords. You take the top three; I’ll get the others.” She set a sheet of paper before him.
He concentrated on his monitor, logged in to the first camera he’d drawn — at a gas station. It offered only a partial view of the road. The image was grainy and colors washed out. He had to scrub slowly and pause at each passing vehicle to study it. Fifty-five was a major road; traffic was heavy.
He glanced beside him. Nilsson was in an identical posture. She was frowning in concentration — as, he supposed, he had been too.
Returning to scrubbing, Shaw asked, “Any train stations, bus depots, rental cars in that direction?”
“No trains, but there’s a bus terminal in Herndon. Three car rental places. And dealerships that probably rent cars too.”
“Buses’re always good. Cash and no ID. Rental car possibly, which leaves a record. But I’d say that’s a chance she’d take.”
Nilsson asked, “What do you think, warrant for Hertz or Avis or whoever? Look at their vids?”
Shaw said, “They’d fight it, on these facts. Same with the bus company.”
After five minutes of silence, other than the clatter of keys, Shaw asked, “What’d you fish for?”
Not missing a beat: “Pike and bass mostly. Some muskie.”
Shaw’s mother, Mary Dove, was the primary hunter in the family. The best with a long gun. Colter was next. But everyone fished. Shaw remembered assembling tackle and going out with one or both parents, sometimes a sibling, early — in cold blue-black dawn. Each would take up a different position on a promontory around what Dorion, his sister, had named Egg Lake, for the obvious reason. By 7 a.m. they would have their take for the week.
In the Compound it wasn’t catch and release. It was catch and eat.
Never toy with animals. They aren’t there for your amusement...
“You?”
He told her he didn’t fish much now. “But growing up, we were a self-sufficient family.”
“Okay. That requires some keep going.”
Where to start?
Shaw gave the nutshell version. How his father, Ashton, and mother, both esteemed academicians, fled the San Francisco Bay Area when Shaw was six, his brother twelve, their sister three, for the property in the Sierra Nevadas.
“Fled?”
“Ashton was into conspiracy theories, only his turned out not to be fictional. He found something that threatened some very powerful people. So he taught himself and us survival skills.”
“These people? They came for you?”
“That’s right. My father didn’t make it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She then glanced his way with an expression he deduced meant: And was the matter ever resolved?
“I took care of things.”
She seemed like a woman who would herself be inclined to take care of things too.
“My mother still lives in the cabin. My sister runs a disaster preparedness and emergency response company on the East Coast. My brother works for the government.”
“Yep. That’s a story and some change.”
“Long answer to a question about fish.”
They returned to their frustratingly slow task.
Each scrubbed through two of their allocated videos without finding any image of her SUV. This meant either she’d turned off, or it had been hidden from the camera by traffic.
Shaw and Nilsson started on their last cameras. Shaw’s showed a grainy, low-def and dark image of a gas station pump. You could see a short stretch of 55 on the far side of the apron.
After a few minutes she said, “Noticed. You haven’t taken or made any calls since you’ve been here.”
He had an idea where the inquiry was headed.
“No.”
And, sure enough:
“You’re not married.”
He thought of Margot, as close as he’d come.
“No. You said you’d been.”
“That’s right.” She shrugged. “But a waste-of-time decision. Not an oh-shit decision. You seeing anybody now?”
He thought of Victoria.
“Sometimes.”
He explained how he and the woman — a security specialist herself — occasionally saw each other, if they had jobs in the same area. “Couple of times a year.”
“That’s not seeing someone,” she said, and the keys clattered.
He said, “You have been making calls. The other phone of yours.”
She laughed. “Believe me. Nobody I date.”
Silence for a moment.
Neither of them typed.
Colter Shaw swiveled toward her. Looked into those verdant eyes and the gaze in return contained a message. He gripped her by the shoulders and kissed her. Hard. She reciprocated, and then rose. He did too, sending his chair wheeling sharply into another workstation.
For a short moment the two were as still as statues, eyes locked. They kissed again. Nilsson’s hands slid to the small of his back and this put the two of them firmly together.
His own right palm slid down her spine, stopping just below the narrow horizontal strap. He too pressed hard.
He felt her breasts against his chest, was embraced by the ambiguous, seductive aura of flowers.
Her eyes closed, then his.
They kissed harder, their mouths hungry.
Her hands went to his cheeks. He took her right and kissed the finger that was enclosed by the serpent ring. She ran the black-tipped nail around his lips.
He looked past her, at the couch against the wall.
He noted a lock on the door and the absence of video cameras in the room — ironic considering what they were doing here.
Her eyes were making the same transit. Her gaze ended at the couch and she turned back and nodded.
They both started toward it, his arm round her waist.
And as they did, Shaw happened to glance to his left. He saw the frozen video image of Route 55. No cars were depicted, no trucks, no hitchhikers. Just the business end of a gas station with a quick mart across the road.
An establishment that Allison Parker might have pulled into sometime that afternoon and, when buying a soda or chips, might have asked the clerk a question about any nearby motels that were decent, or made a comment from which their final destination could be deduced.
He turned to Nilsson, who, he found, was staring at the same screen.
Their eyes met once more, a different gaze this time. He smiled. For Nilsson’s part, she gave a wistful laugh. Another long kiss and they retired to their respective workstations, each hitting play at exactly the same moment.
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