Trust Your Eyes (36 page)

A bad person.

A very bad person.

A total shit.

That’s what she was. Maybe, she kept telling herself, she had it coming. She’d brought this on herself. That much was clear. She wouldn’t be here, after months on the run, changing stained sheets in a one-star hotel in a bad part of Tampa, sharing Whoppers with Octavio, if she hadn’t always thought of herself first.

Karma was some bitch.

One night, talking to Octavio, she said, “Do you believe that if you do bad things, eventually you get punished?”

“In this world?” he asked.

“Yeah, I guess.”

He shook his head regretfully. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I have known people who, their entire lives, deserved to be punished for the things they had done, but never were. All one can hope for is that they get what’s coming to them after.”

“If you get what you deserve while you’re still alive, do you think, when you die, that things are already settled?”

“I don’t believe you are a bad person,” Octavio told her. “I believe you are a good person.”

She cried. She cried for a very long time. She cried so long that she exhausted herself. Octavio tucked her into her rollaway bed in the storage room. He sat on the edge of the bed and patted her shoulder until she went to sleep.

He wanted to help her. He believed that whatever Adele Farmer had done, her mother would forgive her.

When he was sure Adele was sleeping soundly, he took her
purse from beneath her bed. In it, he found identification that showed she was not Adele Farmer at all. She was Allison Fitch.

And her mother was not in Seattle, as Allison had said. There was a tattered letter in the purse, a letter from her mother dated more than a year ago, in which she told her daughter that she loved her very much, and hoped that she was happy in New York, but that she was always welcome to move back to Dayton.

Dayton?

Octavio checked the return address sticker on the back of the envelope, wrote down some information, then returned the letter and the ID to the purse and slid it back under the rollaway bed. He went online and found a phone number for Doris Fitch. It was late to be calling—it was past midnight—but Octavio was sure the woman would want to know where her daughter was, regardless of the hour.

When he got Doris Fitch on the phone, he spoke in a whisper, but she was nearly hysterical at the news.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God, she’s alive. I can’t believe it. How is she? Is she hurt? Is she okay? Put her on! Put her on the phone. I have to hear her voice.”

Octavio said he believed that if Allison knew he had been speaking to her mother, she would take off, that it would be better if Doris were to come down from Ohio and surprise her daughter.

Doris Fitch, who was thrilled by this news but still smart enough to be cautious, said that if Octavio was not going to put her daughter on the phone, she needed some sort of proof that it was really her daughter working at the motel.

Octavio said, “She told me that when she was little, around eight or nine, you would do finger puppet plays, that you would reenact entire scenes from
The Wizard of Oz
for her with your fingers, and that she loved it so much.”

Doris Fitch thought she would die.

“I’ll get a flight out tomorrow,” she said. “Tell me where you are, exactly.”

Octavio gave her the name of the motel, and the address. “When you get off the plane, just tell the cabdriver. He will find it.”

When he got off the phone, Octavio felt very good about himself. He had done a good thing.

Adele—Allison—was going to be so surprised.

FORTY-FOUR

I’D
made an appointment for two, Monday afternoon, to meet with Darla Kurtz, who was the administrator of Glace House, a residence for psychiatric outpatients. I’d left Julie at the house. She’d already spent the entire morning on the phone trying, with very little success, to track down someone to talk to at Whirl360.

Glace House was actually a beautiful, celery green three-story Victorian home in an older part of Promise Falls, with gingerbread trim and a porch that wrapped around two sides. Most likely built in the 1920s, it sat on a corner, with an expansive front yard and hedges running along both sidewalks. I parked on the street and as I walked up the driveway spotted a wispy-haired, stick-thin man in jeans and a T-shirt putting a fresh coat of white paint on the front porch railing.

“Hello,” he said to me.

“Hi,” I said.

“You can’t be too careful,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You can’t be too careful,” he repeated.

“About what?” I asked.

He smiled. “That’s what they say.” He gave me a wink and went back to his work.

I rang the front bell and a short woman in her fifties held the door open for me. “How are you?” she said.

“Ms. Kurtz?” I said.

She nodded.

“I’m Ray Kilbride. We were talking about my brother, Thomas? I think Laura Grigorin was in touch with you?”

Another nod. “Of course,” she said, peering over a pair of reading glasses.

If she were a man, I’d say she had a brush cut, but maybe you don’t call it that when it’s a woman. She led me into her office, which was in a room just off the front foyer. Years ago, this must have been a very stately home, but a quick look showed that it had been made into apartments. A plump woman in a heavy winter coat was sitting on a set of steps that led to the second floor. It was as warm in the house as it was outside, and I couldn’t understand why she was wearing it. She stared at me blankly as I slipped into the office.

“First, thanks for seeing me,” I said. The wall of her office showed degrees in psychology and social work. “I’ve heard some good things about Glace House.”

She smiled. “Well, we try.”

I gave her a quick sketch on Thomas. “I guess he’s what you’d call pretty high functioning in many ways. But not quite able to live on his own, at least that’s my worry. Our father died recently, and he looked after all of Thomas’s needs. Made his meals, did the laundry, cleaned the house, didn’t really expect anything of Thomas, which in turn, I guess, made my brother pretty dependent. But I think, given the opportunity, he’s perfectly capable. Dad just found it easier to do everything himself. But even if Thomas could look after himself and his meals and so forth, I
don’t think he’s capable of looking after the house himself. Paying bills, making sure the property taxes are looked after, that type of thing. I’m not sure he’d be able to handle it. And the thing is, he does have some strange notions.”

The woman smiled. “He’ll fit in fine here, then. Did you meet Ziggy?”

“Ziggy?”

“He’s painting out front.”

“Yes, I did. He mentioned something about not being too careful.”

“That’s because any one of us might be an alien. In disguise.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good advice, I suppose. Listen, I don’t know whether Laura mentioned that my brother is pretty attached to his computer.”

“I believe she did say something about that.”

“He’s always on those sites where you can explore city streets. Would that be a problem if he lived here?”

She shook her head. “No. In fact, many of the residents have them. It keeps them in touch and connected and entertained.” She rolled her eyes. “Not always the kind of entertainment I would prefer.”

“Thomas has been known to fire off e-mails that have caused us a bit of grief later.” I filled her in.

“Well,” she said, “it happens. If someone were to do that here, we’d have to remove Internet privileges for a period of time. If it persisted, we’d have to cut them off. But most everyone here, they’re eager to please.”

She showed me around. The house was orderly and well maintained. In the kitchen, I found one resident loading a dishwasher while another sat at a table eating a jelly sandwich. There were two rooms sitting empty on the second floor, one that looked out to the street and the other overlooking the backyard.

“Views don’t matter a lot to Thomas,” I said. “You’d probably be best saving the better one for someone else.”

Each of the rooms was roughly twelve by twelve feet. There was a bed, a couple of chairs, and a desk. There were two bathrooms on each floor.

“You’ll want to bring him over,” she said, “to check things out.”

“Yeah,” I nodded, feeling anxious.

Another woman approached. She was wearing a cardigan that looked a couple of sizes too big, a peasant skirt, and a pair of those neon purple plastic sandals, Crocs. Her hair was long and frizzy, and she looked pretty riled.

She stood in front of the two of us and said to me, “Are you Ray Kilbride?”

“Yes,” I said, hesitantly.

She extended a hand. “I’m Darla Kurtz.”

Slowly, I accepted her hand and gave it a shake, all the while looking at my tour guide. She smiled sheepishly at me.

The new Darla Kurtz said to me, “I’m sorry. I got held up at a city hall meeting.” Then, to my guide, she said, “Barbara, you’ve been very naughty, again.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kurtz.”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

“Okay.” Barbara turned to me and said, “I hope Thomas gets to come and stay here. He sounds really interesting.”

I
got out of there about an hour later. The real Darla Kurtz was every bit as welcoming as the phony one, but she had more specific questions. She also wanted me to bring Thomas in for a visit.

I was getting into the car when my cell rang.

“Get this,” Julie said.

“What?”

“So I’ve been getting bounced all over the place at Whirl360. The place is in absolute chaos.”

I slammed the door and reached for the seat belt with my free hand. “So they have been hacked?”

“No, shit, not that. One of their top people got killed.”

“What? When?”

“Yesterday. Him and his wife.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“Hang on, I made some notes. Okay, the guy’s name was Kyle Billings, and his wife’s name was Rochelle. They live in Oak Park, in Chicago. That’s where the company’s head office is. The wife’s sister was trying to get in touch with her last night, couldn’t get her or her husband on the phone, no answer at the house but both cars were there. So they called the police, and they were both in the basement. Dead.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Julie said. “Guess what Billings did at Whirl360?”

“Tell me.”

“He’s the guy who wrote the program that automatically blurs faces and license plates and all that kind of thing.”

I was about to put the key into the ignition and stopped. “Jesus.”

“And this other stuff, I just got this off the
Chicago Tribune
Web site. They’re attributing this to unnamed sources in the police department. How they died.”

“Go on.”

“Okay, so Billings was stabbed. Something very long and pointed, like an ice pick, maybe. But the wife—are you sitting down?”

“Julie, for Christ’s sake, just tell me.”

“She was suffocated, Ray. Someone put a bag over her head.”

FORTY-FIVE

LEWIS
Blocker went online and read everything he could find about Kathleen Ford and her new Web site. She had a lot of money to put behind it, and was said to be attracting big names to write for it. She’d lured a prominent columnist from the
New York Times
. Some well-known talking heads from Fox and MSNBC had agreed to be regular contributors. There’d be plenty of celebrity gossip. In these respects, it was much like the site it was taking on. But Kathleen Ford was going to offer a few new things, too. She’d attracted two or three novelists—Stephen King and John Grisham were among those rumored to have been approached—who would write serially for it. Every week, a new installment, just like in the old Victorian newspapers. There was even some mention of an animated political cartoon, but there was no hint as to who might produce it.

Lewis took special note of that.

He wrote down a few questions, thought about how he was
going to play this, and then found a contact number for the public relations department of Kathleen Ford’s enterprise.

He was put in touch with a woman named Florence Highgold. Lewis couldn’t believe it was a real name, but she did actually work there, so what the hell. Lewis explained that he was doing a freelance business piece on Ford’s new Web site for the
Wall Street Journal
. He was particularly interested in the kind of talent pool Ford was intending to draw from.

“This whole serialized novel thing,” Lewis said. “I’d heard that the guy who wrote
The Da Vinci Code
had been talked into writing something.”

Florence laughed. “Even with the resources Ms. Ford has, I’m not sure she could afford him.”

“Well, if she can afford King and Grisham—”

“We’re not confirming that either of those men have in fact been commissioned to do anything for the Web site,” Florence said.

Lewis asked her about the launch date for the site, how many visits they expected it to receive. Would it be a site you had to pay to read? And if not, would all their income be derived from advertising?

He made it sound like an afterthought when he asked, “And what about artists? Does a site like that need a lot of illustrators?”

“Well, you certainly need Web artists to come up with a concept for the site,” Florence said. “You need a distinctive graphic design. But once you have that up and running, it kind of runs itself.”

“So it’s not like you’d have contributing artists in the way you would contributing writers.”

“That’s not entirely true. We’ve already said we’d like to do animated political cartoons.”

“You have someone for that?”

“We do,” Florence said. “Are you familiar with Ray Kilbride’s work?”

Even as she said the name, Lewis was tapping it into a search engine. When the results popped up, he hit Images.

The screen filled with dozens of postage-stamp-sized pictures.

“Yeah, I believe I have,” Lewis said. He clicked on an illustration of Newt Gingrich that had appeared in a Chicago magazine, credited to Ray Kilbride. “He did that Gingrich drawing, didn’t he?”