False Witness (10 page)

But most had just congratulated him, as if witnessing a cold-blooded murder was some sort of journalistic coup, like Woodward and Bernstein connecting the dots on the Watergate burglary. Bill Vogt, the Chronicle’s frenetic young publisher – who was only four years older than Alex, and had never given him the time of day before – was suddenly his shadow. He invited Alex to lunch at Saint Germain with the CEO of the Chicago-based holding company that owned the
Chronicle
. Alex had found the old bastard marginally more charming than a dead eel, and said as much to Vogt after the lunch. Vogt had laughed and clapped him on the back. “I won’t disagree with you, Dunnsie,” he’d said. “But he loves
you
, and he owns papers all over the goddamn world. I personally wouldn’t mind running the Miami Dispatch, and if that was to happen, I’d need a managing editor. Are you picking up what I’m laying down?” Alex had offered him a tired smile but said nothing.

Shippy had shown him fatherly concern in his gruff way, but his old-school ethics had kept him from getting too close to an employee. Sam Walsh had been uncharacteristically quiet in the weeks after Ferbey’s murder, no doubt realizing that Alex couldn’t cover his own story, and that this was his chance to finally jump into the crime beat he’d been coveting since he showed up at the Chronicle from whatever jerkwater weekly he’d been working at.

Ultimately, Alex didn’t feel a real connection with any of them. As he sat there with his duffle, waiting on the cab that would take him to the rental car company, which would assign him a vehicle for his voyage into the great unknown, Alex realized he hadn’t made a single honest-to-god
friend
since his days at Carleton almost ten years earlier. And as much as he’d truly loved those people, the closest he’d come to talking with any of them in years had been messaging back and forth on Facebook. Hell, he’d been living at the same address for four years and didn’t know the name of a single neighbor in his condo complex. He could pick them out of a line-up, sure, but anything more was a mystery.

Chuck Palliser
, he thought bleakly as he took a final look around from the condo’s front door.
Chuck was my friend. And now he’s dead and I’m running for my life.
When the driver came to his door, Alex flipped on the porch light before he locked the door behind him. He didn’t know why, but it made him feel a little better.

#

The drama of the Rockies gave way to the smaller Kootenay Mountains as Alex wound his way west past countless tourist towns that were hinted at by road signs, but rarely visible from the highway. Most were hidden from the road by dense pine forest and steep dropoffs, but they all had large signs telling visitors how they’d have to be bug-shit crazy not to
Stop ‘Inn’ For Pie at the River Ridge Inn
or
Take a Tour Through the Sawmill Museum and See How The West Was Once!
One place, a little hamlet north of Creston, was home to the Boswell Bottle House, a twelve-hundred-square-foot architectural wonder whose walls were made out of five hundred thousand embalming fluid bottles. Alex wondered absently how many dead people half a million bottles represented.

The secondary highway from Creston to Crawford Bay was a goat path full of blind corners, and Alex was virtually alone on the road that ran parallel to the eastern shore of Kootenay Lake. It was still familiar to him, even though it had been more than twenty years since he’d traveled it. He’d spent countless summer hours as a kid in the back of his parents’ station wagon, marveling at the steep dropoffs and rough rock faces on either side of the road, so different from the flat, golden carpet that rolled away from the highways in Alberta. It was a different time then, before the work that would take his father away from home so often, before his mother would crawl inside her bottle. They’d head out for the six–hour drive from Calgary, taking the long way instead of the TransCanada, singing goofy songs like The Happy Wanderer and Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall. As they sang that particular chestnut, Alex always imagined his grandfather picking up a stubby bottle of Old Style Pilsner from the shelf in his dusty garage and passing it around to the troop of buddies who used to gather there to shoot the shit on a summer afternoon. It would be warm if it was on a shelf instead of in the noisy old tank of a fridge in the garage, but in Alex’s little scenario, no one seemed to care.

He drove in a sort of semi-daydream, his thoughts winding and wandering with the road, switchback after switchback, following the big lake. Countless more hamlets came and went in the Corolla’s rearview mirror, until he reached the turnoff for a stretch of secondary highway that took a right angle from the main road. Alex smiled at the nondescript blue sign with white letters that said, simply,
Lost Lake
. As a kid, that sign would always elicit a minor thrill in him, knowing he was only a half-hour from the place that was the geographical embodiment of everything that was good in life, everything that was fun, everything that was
summer
. As he got older and his father got richer and his mother got drunker, their vacation destinations got more exotic – Paris, Honduras, Singapore – before his parents finally started going on separate vacations when Alex was sixteen. None of them had ever measured up to that little sign next to a lonely road in B.C.

The narrow road ran straight for a couple of miles before curving northeast. A few miles later, it dropped sharply into a corkscrew that wound him slowly down to the gulch that was home to Lost Lake and the town that had grown up around it. The Corolla’s brakes squealed mildly in protest of the extra effort they were putting in on the downward grade, but Alex paid no mind. He watched as the town emerged from behind the curved rock wall on the right side of the highway, like a stage curtain being pulled aside to reveal the show that was about to begin.

I’m back
, he thought, realizing that at some point in his drive, he’d sprouted a fool’s grin.

In his reverie, he failed to notice the motorcycle in his rearview mirror.

Crowe watched impatiently as the kid’s fat fingers roamed across a pair of keyboards. The constant clack-clack-clacking of the plastic keys put his teeth on edge and made him long for a tall, stiff bourbon.

They were in a concrete-walled basement, lined with cheap plastic shelving units piled high with the guts of various electronic devices. The place reeked of stale pot, pizza, and moldering laundry. The two young women Crowe had brought with him seemed oblivious to the squalor, though, or maybe they were just used to it. They sat quietly on a legless old sofa, practicing their own keyboarding skills on their phones and looking bored. Dead, dusty air hung in the afternoon heat beaming in through the shallow windows beneath a water-stained acoustic tile ceiling.

Crowe stood with his arms crossed, surveying the suite. “Decorator still on vacation?”

“Good one,” the kid said absently as he reached for a soda cup the size of a small cistern. The other hand still pecked with a speed that was amazing, considering its girth. “I’m laughing on the inside, where it counts.”

You wouldn’t be laughing if you were face to face with Rufus Hodge like I was two hours ago
, Crowe thought. He would very much have liked to kick the punk’s chair out from under his sweat-stained ass, but he couldn’t, and not just because the kid tipped the scales at upwards of three hundred and fifty pounds. As annoying as Donald Worrell was, he was also one of Crowe’s most valuable assets. English was Worrell’s second language – he thought in binary code, and it seemed like no time elapsed between the synapses closing in his brain and his fingers translating the thought into keyboard actions. Crowe almost believed the kid could actually
see
in code, like some fat, pimply, neck-bearded Neo in a real-life Matrix. In other words, Worrell was a hacker’s hacker. He could smash through the strongest firewalls with one hand scratching his balls. He broke encryptions and sauntered in through backdoors like Gretzky behind the net, getting in and getting out with what he wanted before anyone had a clue that something was amiss. And if that wasn’t enough, he had a tested IQ in the 170 range.

And goddamned if he doesn’t know it, too
, Crowe thought acidly.

“Aaaand
boom
, we’re in,” the kid said without taking his eyes off the righthand screen on his desk. “Personnel files for the Badlands Crowbar Hotel. Fucking feds are taking that new crime bill seriously – this took me twice as long as it should have.” He flashed Crowe a smug grin. “That’s gonna cost you extra, my friend.”

Crowe stifled the urge to cuff him across the jaw, and instead pointed to the girls on the couch. “Don’t tell me, tell them.” Worrell waggled his eyebrows. Crowe saw one of the girls, a petite Filipino who called herself Mariah Charisma, roll her eyes. He focused on the screen, scrolling down the page and scrutinizing rows of mug shots. The Bandlands Institute’s employees were listed by occupation – administration, supervisors, more supervisors, and finally guards. It didn’t take him long to recognize a familiar mustachioed face. He clicked on the mug to expand both the photo and the information, then pulled a small notebook from the pocket of his jeans and scribbled in it.

“Can you hack Facebook?” he asked Worrell.

The kid looked at Crowe like he was an adorable but soft-headed grandmother who needed to be indulged. “Yes, Mr. Crowe, I can hack Facebook. I can also tie my shoes
and
go to the bathroom all by myself.”

Crowe felt the muscles in his neck tighten painfully, but he managed to keep it out of his voice. He pointed out the mug shot to Worrell, who glanced idly at the man with the moustache. “I want everything you can find on this guy.”

More tapping. Within a minute, one of the screens showed the familiar white page with blue highlights, this one with a square picture of the guard and a wide horizontal shot of him in a karate uniform, looking very serious indeed. Crowe scrolled through his wall posts and read through the private messages, scanned the photo albums, occasionally jotting in his notebook. He wondered absently how he ever managed to do his job before the current obsession with living your life online. There seemed to be a significant portion of the population that not only felt the need to announce to the world that they had just taken a shit, but also needed to take a photo of themselves in the bathroom mirror to prove it. He didn’t understand it, but he was very glad it existed.

Worrell, meanwhile, had dropped his country-wide ass on the sofa between the two girls. Mariah was smiling at the kid now, years of practice as a professional pleaser kicking in like instinct. The other girl, a wide-eyed buxom blonde who was a recent addition to the Wild Roses’ stable, seemed genial, if a little confused. Crowe cringed when he saw the kid had dropped his right hand down the front of his stained grey sweatpants.

“Rein it in, Romeo,” he said with unconcealed irritation. “I brought you two girls because I gave you two jobs. You only finished one.”

Worrell had retrieved a bottle of champagne from a pony fridge next to the sofa, and was in the process of filling three plastic Solo cups. Crowe was a little surprised to see it was the real deal, Laurent-Perrier, upwards of two hundred bucks a bottle. But why not? He knew he wasn’t Worrell’s only client, and it wasn’t like the fucker was blowing his money on clothes and girls.

He scowled as the kid drained his cup in three gulps, bubbly dripping from the sides of his mouth onto his Nirvana t-shirt. “I finished that before you even got here,” he said, his free hand now out of his pants and groping one of Mariah’s pert breasts through her blouse. “He’s in a place called Lost Lake. In the Kootenays. There’s a printout on the desk.”

Crowe looked down, dumbfounded. Sure enough, there was a sheet with a credit card number and the name of a motel. His eyes narrowed.
There’s no way he got all this so fast. No fucking way.
Crowe considered himself a consummate professional, worth every penny of the astronomical fees he charged his clients, but even he couldn’t promise his clients a turnaround like this. It beggared belief. “You managed to dig all this up in less than three hours?” he asked, fixing the kid with a serious glare. “Listen to me very closely, Donny: you fuck with me, you fuck with my employer, and trust me, that’s the last thing on earth you ever want to do. If you’re fucking with me, you better fess up right now. If you don’t, I’ll take that hand you have down your pants and shove it so far up your ass you’ll be brushing your teeth from the inside.”

Worrell snorted a laugh, oblivious to the threat. “Come
on
, man, give me some credit. All I had to do was Google the guy’s name and hack
his
Facebook account. Cross-reference some names, browse through some friends’ photos and
their
accounts, and I find out he used to spend his summers at a little town in the Kootenays as a kid. Where better for a guy on the run to hide out than a place he knows intimately, that barely makes it onto the map, and that’s only a few hours from home?”

Crowe’s glare turned steely. “That doesn’t explain the rest of the information.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. This isn’t rocket science, dude. All I had to do was check the rosters of the three motels in town to find someone named Alex who had checked in within the last couple of days. Even at the height of tourist season, a little place like Lost Lake isn’t going to have that many people registering in the middle of the week.”

Crowe glanced down at the paper. Both the Mastercard and the rental car were in the name of Alex Wolfe.
This is too easy
. “Why would he keep his same first name?”

The kid rolled his eyes. Crowe was glad his Sig Sauer was in the Lincoln; otherwise, he might have given in to the urge to put a few slugs into the kid’s flabby tits.

“Think about it,” Worrell said as if Crowe were a particularly dim student. “We’re programmed from birth to respond to our names. How suspicious would it be to show up in some town, tell people your name is Steve, and then sit there oblivious every time someone says
‘Hey! Steve!’
? Once I found the name, it only took a few minutes to find out that the credit card issued to Alex Wolfe was less than two months old, had never been used before renting a late-model Corolla, and was
twenty grand in the black
.” He paused to let that sink in. “And if that doesn’t raise enough red flags, according to the file, he’s thirty-three years old. Know any thirty-three-year-olds who just got a credit card?”