Nine Years Gone (21 page)

I had two options as I saw it: stay in my office and go to jail when the police found whatever Tess had hidden in my house, or get the hell out of there while I still could and stop her before she hurt me further. I chose the latter and walked to my car, still parked a couple of blocks from the house. Captain Morgan evidently didn’t want to make it easy on me, because a marked police cruiser sat just two feet or so off my bumper. Rather than climb into my car right away and try to outrun the cop, I knocked on his window and smiled at him, my hand held outstretched as if I wanted to shake. He opened his door and nodded at me, ignoring my hand.

“Mr. Hale.”

“Officer . . .” I said, searching the man’s uniform for a nametag and dropping my arm to my side. “Loomis. It’s very nice to meet you.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Well,” I said, looking up and down the street. No other cars approached. “I figured Leonard Morgan wanted you to follow me, and I know how tricky some of these streets can be, so I thought I’d do you a favor and tell you right away that I plan to drive to the Dierbergs in Glendale for some groceries.”

“That on Manchester Road?” asked Loomis.

“That’s right,” I said, nodding. “And just so you know, I’ll take Lockwood Avenue to Berry Road and Berry to Manchester. That way, we won’t get stuck waiting for a train.”

“I’ll follow you pretty closely just the same.”

“Wouldn’t expect otherwise,” I said, walking back to my car. I didn’t actually have to go grocery shopping, but I had worked at the store while I was in high school, so I knew it well enough to be reasonably sure of my ability to lose Loomis there. After the conversation, I got in my car and took the exact route I said I would, all the while making a call to a cab company and requesting a pickup as soon as possible.

Loomis stayed within a car length of my rear bumper for the entire three-mile drive to the store, but that didn’t bother me. Once I reached Dierbergs, I parked near an exit, far enough from the store entrance that few other cars were around. Loomis pulled in right beside me but left his engine running. Instead of getting out, he rolled down his window.

“You got an idea of how long you’re going to take?”

“Twenty to thirty minutes,” I said. “Maybe longer if there’s a line at the butcher counter.”

“Make it fifteen or I’m coming in after you and dragging you out.”

I put my hand on the top of his car and leaned down. “Does your spouse do the grocery shopping in your house?”

Loomis’s face was impassive. “Yeah. Why?”

“Because the checkout line alone will take me at least ten minutes. If you don’t want to wait, just go back to my house. I’ll meet you there.”

Loomis looked around the parking lot and waved at a little boy helping his mother load groceries into the back of their SUV. “Just hurry up.”

“I’ll do my best.”

The officer smirked and closed his window while I popped my car’s trunk. In addition to the duffle bag full of money and my gun, I had a number of reusable grocery bags that my wife had purchased in a fit of environmental friendliness. I folded two of those bags and stuffed them into a third, along with five bricks of ten thousand dollars each and my Uncle Simon’s firearm.

Upon closing the trunk, I nodded to Loomis and walked toward the store, taking fresh stock of my surroundings. Glendale was an older suburb that very well could have provided the backdrop if Hollywood decided to do another remake of “Leave It to Beaver
.
” I couldn’t see it yet, but right next to the grocery store was an upper-middle-class neighborhood and my cab ride out of the area.

As soon as I entered the store, I weaved my way around carts and shoppers with hand baskets until I reached the butcher section, where I pushed through a double set of doors in back as if I still worked there. I kept my head up and walked quickly, exiting the building through a rear-facing loading dock without anyone even giving me a second glance. My cab was just a street over, so I hopped the wooden privacy fence that separated the grocery store from the surrounding neighborhood and walked through the rear yard of a brick, ranch-style home. My driver, as expected, waited for me out front.

I was pretty sure Loomis was going to be pissed.

“Where to?” asked the cabdriver.

I gave him Isaac Cohen’s address in Kirkwood, and we headed off. The drive took us about ten minutes, after which I gave the cabbie forty bucks, the last money I had in my wallet, and he pulled off without saying a word. I punched in the code on the control panel on the garage and waited while the lift opened the door, exposing my buddies old Jeep.

Hopefully it’d still be good for at least one more ride.

I drove west until I hit Washington, a small town of maybe fifteen thousand residents along the Missouri River. Roughly an hour had passed since I left the grocery store, which meant Morgan knew I had run. I didn’t have much time, so I pulled over at a gas station and called my wife. She, unfortunately, didn’t answer, so I left her a voice mail requesting that she stay in Chicago no matter what she heard about me. I also warned her that the next time I talked to her, I’d call her on a different number.

After that, I drove until I found a shopping center with a big department store. I grabbed four hundred dollars from my stash and bought a prepaid cell phone and a calling card good for 450 minutes of airtime. More than anything right now, I needed time to let the system work, to find out who Tess really was and what she had done. The phone could at least let me keep in touch with people until that happened.

When I got back to the jeep, I took out my old phone and called Captain Morgan.

“Leonard,” I greeted him. “How you doing?”

“I’ve been better,” he said. “Seems my officer made a mistake trusting you. Can’t say I’m too surprised myself.”

I opened the driver’s door and sat down, but didn’t put the key in the ignition.

“I’m sorry to hear your assessment of my character. I suppose it’s not going to help my case if I tell you that I had a good reason to run.”

“At this point, probably not.”

Despite the relatively cool temperature outside, Isaac’s vinyl seats held the sun’s heat well, so I fanned my shirt to keep from sweating.

“Can I ask what’s going on at my house?”

“We finished our search,” said Morgan. “If you drive home, I would love to ask you some questions.”

“What’d you find?” I asked, putting the key in the ignition. I may have been overestimating his abilities, but I didn’t turn the engine over. Morgan wouldn’t be able to tell what kind of car I had stolen by the sound of the engine alone, but Isaac’s jeep made a distinct rumble. If Morgan was hunting me, I didn’t want to give him anything that would narrow the pool of suspect vehicles.

“A pair of suede gloves in your laundry. Are they yours?”

“No,” I said, sitting straighter, my voice flat.

“You sure about that? They’re dark brown, and they’ve got blood spatter and some gunshot residue on them. They’re a men’s size large, so I doubt they belong to your wife.”

I exhaled long and slow. “They’re not mine.”

“I sent them to the lab for processing,” said Morgan. “Will they be able to match the blood on the gloves to Isaac Cohen?”

I leaned my head back against the seat rest. I should have checked the hamper. “That’d be my guess.”

“I find it very interesting that you mentioned suede gloves as a possible explanation for why we found only your prints on the firearm that killed Isaac Cohen, and then we found blood-spattered suede gloves in your laundry.” Morgan paused. “Maybe interesting isn’t the right word. Maybe I should have said intriguing.”

“There’s nothing intriguing or even surprising about it. Tess reads my books.”

“And that explains the gloves how?”

I opened the collar on my shirt to get some air. “I published a book in 2009 called
Blindly into Darkness
. In it, the villain shoots my protagonist’s partner with my protagonist’s gun. The villain wears suede gloves so he won’t leave prints and so he won’t damage prints already on the weapon. Tess got the idea from my book. She probably thinks it’s poetic justice of some twisted sort.”

“The way you describe her, she is truly a devious woman,” said Morgan. “We’ll examine those gloves inside and out. If Ms. Girard or Mr. Tarawally wore them to shoot Isaac Cohen, we’ll find something to show that. Whether people realize it or not, we leave parts of ourselves everywhere we go. Skin cells, sweat, hair. We’ll find it, and we’ll verify your story. You just come on in, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

“No,” I said, balling my hands into fists. “You’re not going to find a thing. Tess isn’t stupid. Look for sweat and things, sure, but also look for talcum powder.”

“Why would we find talcum powder in there?”

“Because it’s still too warm for gloves. Moses would have known that he’d sweat while wearing them, so he probably put on latex gloves beneath them.”

“Is that in your book, too?”

“No,” I said, watching as a black minivan pulled into a spot about twenty feet from me. A woman got out and walked to the backseat for a child in a car seat. “It’s common sense.”

“I’d say that’s far from common.”

I sighed. “That depends on who you ask.”

“I think it’s time for you to come in, Mr. Hale. I’m going to approach the prosecutor with the evidence we’ve collected so far, and I’m going to secure an arrest warrant. If you make us look for you, there’s a chance some small-town sheriff with a shotgun’s going to find you first. He might think this is his big opportunity to be a hero. You don’t want that.”

“I appreciate the advice. I’ll stay out of small towns.”

“Think carefully about this road you’re about to travel, Mr. Hale. It doesn’t have to go down like this.”

“Unfortunately, it does,” I said. “You’ve been fair to me, and I appreciate that. Please just keep an open mind about things you might see in the next couple of days.”

Morgan started to say something, but I turned off my phone and threw it on the backseat before driving out of the parking lot. I didn’t know how cell phones worked, but I had seen enough television—and I trusted their writers to get the details at least somewhat close—to know that the police probably couldn’t track me with the phone off. At the same time, their first move would be to determine what cell tower my call had originated from in order to narrow their search, which meant I needed to get out of the area quickly.

I took US-100 east until I hit I-44. I planned to keep going east and eventually switch to I-64, which would take me straight through St. Louis in another hour, and Louisville, Kentucky a couple hours after that, something I didn’t think Morgan would expect me to do. Before I hit the city, I stopped at a gas station near Eureka to top off the Jeep’s tank and transfer a few numbers from my old cell phone to my new one. After that, I removed the battery and SIM card from the old phone and tossed them in trashcans at two separate fast food joints around town. I didn’t know if that would complicate Morgan’s search, but it couldn’t hurt.

With those stops made, I drove east until I hit St. Louis, at which point I merged onto I64 for the rest of the drive. Eventually, I came to a rest area east of Mount Vernon, Illinois, where I stopped to charge my new phone in the welcome center and make a few calls, starting with Vince.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s Steve.”

“New number?”

“For now,” I said. “Listen. A couple of things have happened that you need to be aware of.”

Vince grunted, and I filled him in on the events of the past few hours. He sighed when I finished speaking.

“You want me to call a buddy in the department and tell him you were with me the night Isaac died?”

I turned on the car. Its engine rumbled my seat, but I didn’t put it into reverse yet.

“Even if you do, you’re one of my best friends. They’re not going to believe you. So please tell me you found something that’ll nail Tess.”

“Yeah, I found something. I called the Admissions Office and said I was the office manager of a law firm, and I was considering Lauren Hampton for a job. They confirmed that she attended from 2001 to 2005 and graduated
cum laude
with a bachelor’s degree in accounting. That was nice, but it really didn’t help me, so I went by the library and met a very attractive young woman at the reference desk who asked me if Lauren was pretty.”

“And I presume you said yes.”

“I did,” said Vince. “As it turns out, one of the fraternities creates a photographic directory every fall containing pictures of the most attractive incoming freshmen girls. They call it
The Menu
. The library didn’t have a copy, so I went by the fraternity and said I was an alumnus. The house mom let me look in their archives. Care to guess who was featured in the 2001 edition?”

“I’m hoping you’re going to say Tess.”

“Not only was it clearly Tess, her picture was submitted by Brandon Yates, proving that they knew each other.”

“Can you get this to Leonard Morgan?”

“Yeah, but first I’ve got a meeting with the detectives who investigated Holly Olson. They’re working off the clock for now, but they never liked how that case ended. I think they’ll be able to get things moving better than I can.”

I leaned my head back and breathed easily. “I didn’t expect this.”

“You did send a professional,” said Vince. “And I’m adding twenty percent to the bill for sending me to Utah. The bars here all close at one in the morning.”

“I’ll pay it,” I said. “Hell, if we survive this and stay out of jail, I’ll double your fee.”

“I like the enthusiasm,” said Vince. “But I’ve got to get going. If you need anything, give me a call.”

I wished him luck before hanging up. I drove until night fell completely, ultimately stopping at a truck stop somewhere in the middle of Illinois. The air smelled like diesel exhaust, and the overhead lights lit the parking lot so well that I could have read a book. My wife and my niece were just two or three hundred miles north, but there might as well have been an ocean between us. Even with Vince’s evidence, with everything else arrayed against me, I didn’t know if I’d see them again. I hoped I would. I called my wife, and when she answered, her voice sounded a little hesitant.

“Hey. It’s Steve.”

“Oh, hi,” she said. “I didn’t know it was you.”

“New number,” I said. “I lost my cell phone, so I bought a replacement.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “How are you?”

“I’m good. I’ve got some news. I haven’t had the lawyers confirm them yet, but Rachel signed the papers. Ashley is now our adoptive daughter.”

Katherine didn’t respond, so I repeated what I just said.

“I heard,” she said, finally. “I’m crying.”

“I’m pretty excited, too.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

I looked at the trucks and other cars around me. “I’m somewhere safe. Tell me about Chicago. Are you guys having a good time?”

I settled into a twenty-minute conversation in which Katherine told me about brunch at the Grand Luxe Café, about a trip to the American Girl Store with Ashley, about a stroll along the harbor and a late afternoon trip to the observation deck of the Willis Tower. She even sent me a picture of her and Ashley, smiling, their faces pressed together with the Chicago River over a hundred stories below them. Vince had taken it right before he left.

As much as I care about my friends, my niece and my wife are the two most important people in my life. They’re the two people I first think of in the morning, and the last two I think of when I close my eyes at night. No matter what happened to me, I couldn’t let them get hurt. They were all I had.

“I’m glad things are going well,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Katherine. She paused before speaking. “Ashley wants to know when we can come home, though. I want to know, too.”

“Soon, maybe tomorrow or the day after.”

“What about Tess?”

“She and I are going to come to an arrangement. She’ll leave us alone after this.”

My wife started to say something, but then caught herself and stopped. “I’m . . . glad.”

“You’re worried, though,” I said, reading into her voice.

“Yes.”

“No matter what happens,” I said. “I’m going to make sure you and Ashley are taken care of.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

I blinked and sunk lower in my seat. “What are you worried about, then?”

“You.”

I swallowed a lump in my throat. “I’ve made mistakes. I’ve got to pay for them.”

She inhaled deeply. “Like Isaac paid for them?”

I shook my head. “It won’t go down like that.”

“Then what will happen?”

I tried to think of something comforting, but my mind was blank, causing me to stick with the truth. “I don’t know.”

Neither of us said anything in response, but I listened to her breathe and found my own breath matching hers. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and that she and Ashley were the two greatest things in my life, but before I could say anything, Katherine’s mom shouted something to her, breaking the spell of the moment.

“Ashley just finished her bath,” said Katherine after a back and forth exchange with her mother. “She and I went to my mom and dad’s house after Vince left. We’re going to read her a chapter from
Charlotte’s Web
and put her to bed.”

“Tell her I love her.”

“I will,” said Katherine. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

She told me she loved me before hanging up. I wanted to call her back or to drive up to Chicago and throw my arms around her, but I couldn’t. Not yet. Before I could stop myself, I dialed Tess’s number and left her a simple message when her phone went to voicemail.

“Tess, it’s Steve Hale,” I said, already feeling sick with dread. “Give me a call back on this number when you can. I’m going to kill your mom tomorrow, but I need your help.”