Tarek shook his head. “I don’t think. I asked him if he was on our e-mail list, and he said he was.”
“Can I have a look at that?”
“I don’t think the manager’d want to just turn it over. Besides, there’s hundreds and hundreds of people on it.”
“What was he buying the airbrush equipment for? Specifically. What kind of work does he do?”
Tarek thought a moment, the studded woman looking at him expectantly. “He said he was an illustrator. But you know, there’s only a few million of those. Oh, yeah, and he said he was going to be doing some stuff for a news Web site.”
“What Web site?”
“Some new one. I don’t know. Something political, like the HuffPo.”
“The what?” Lewis asked. He knew his way around the Internet, but he still preferred a real newspaper to reading one online.
Tarek shrugged. “You know, the one with the lady with the accent. She’s on Bill Maher’s show once in a while.”
Lewis hated that guy’s program. Left-wing dickhead.
“But not that site? A different one?”
Tarek shrugged. “That’s all I know. Good luck.”
LEWIS got a booth at a cafe around the corner, ordered a corned beef on rye with a dill pickle and coffee, and called Howard Talliman.
“You know that HuffPo site?” he asked.
“Of course,” Howard said. “Why?”
“You know about some new site that’s coming out that’s similar to it?”
“I could ask around,” Howard said. “Why?”
“Just ask and get back to me quick as you can.”
LEWIS was finishing his coffee when his cell rang. “Kathleen Ford’s starting one up,” Howard said.
“Should I know who the hell she is?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so I think it’s possible she may have hired our man to work for her.”
“You got a name?”
“Not yet, but I will. You got some contacts for this Ford chick?” Lewis had out his pen and notepad, scribbled down a couple of numbers Howard gave him. “You know her?”
“We are familiar with each other,” Howard said. “But I wouldn’t drop my name. She thinks I’m a reptile.”
Lewis ended the call, thinking maybe this Kathleen Ford was a pretty good judge of character, although he had no illusions that, if she were to meet him, she’d view him any differently.
FORTY-THREE
She so wanted to call her mother. It was like an ache.
It had been nine months. Allison Fitch couldn’t believe she’d managed to hold off this long. Not that she hadn’t considered it dozens of times. More than once she’d picked up a phone-not her own; she’d pitched it within minutes of fleeing her apartment building-and started dialing. Once, she’d discovered a cell on a stall floor in the ladies’ room at the Lubbock restaurant where she was working briefly, and dialed every digit of her mother’s phone number but the last before she’d thought better of it and dropped the phone back where she’d found it. It was entirely possible her mother’s line was being tapped, her place being watched. Her mother didn’t own a cell phone, and even if she did, Allison figured there was probably a way to bug those, too. Didn’t they do it on that TV show about the drug trade in Baltimore?
She didn’t know for certain, of course, that anyone was listening to her mother’s phone conversations. But assuming they were, was it likely they were still doing it now, all these months later? Sooner or later, wouldn’t they just give up?
Allison could only imagine what her mother was going through. True, she had a history of putting Mom through this kind of anguish. When she was nineteen, hours before boarding her flight, Allison had informed her mother she’d be gone to Uruguay for a month with her boyfriend, the one who played electric piano in that band, and she’d been away for ten days before she even realized they’d actually gone to Paraguay. Then, at twenty-one she was given a car-an old rusted Neon, but who’s complaining-by her uncle Bert, on her father’s side, which prompted her to check out Malibu, which was only twenty-two hundred or so miles away. Threw some clothes in a bag and set off on her own. Five days into the trip she decided to drop in unannounced on her cousin Portia in Albuquerque, which was along the way, and when Portia opened the door and saw her she screamed, “Oh my God you have to call your mother she’s called everyone in the family and thinks you’re dead!”
But disappearing for nine months was, even by Allison’s standards of irresponsibility, over the top.
There was no way to tell her mother it was different this time, that there was no safe way to let her know she hadn’t called home not because she was a thoughtless, self-centered twit, but because she was afraid that if she did, she’d get herself killed.
Allison figured it was better to put her mother through hell and show up one day, alive, than put her mind at ease by calling and end up dead. In some ways, she thought, maybe her history of never considering how her actions affected others was a blessing. Perhaps it would make her mother worry less. If Allison were the kind of daughter who always let her parents know where she was every minute of the day, and then went missing, well, that’d be a real cause for concern.
Allison wanted to think that was the case, but knew in her heart it wasn’t. Her mother had to be going out of her mind.
Occasionally, during her travels, she’d borrow someone’s computer and do a search on herself, see if there were any news stories about her disappearance. There was one, not long after she’d gone missing, but very little after that. Not much comfort there. Knowing that you mattered so little. That you could vanish off the face of the earth and they weren’t putting your face on the side of milk cartons. Maybe she was too old for that.
But there certainly were stories about the death of Bridget Sawchuck.
Whoa.
They were short on details, but what few details there were Allison knew to be total flights of fucking fantasy.
“Died suddenly.” Yeah, well, that was sort of true. But not really.
If Allison hadn’t been totally convinced before that running and hiding was the smartest thing to do, she certainly was after seeing the stories about Bridget. If the powers that be could cover up the murder of a woman like her, they could do anything.
Coming forward was not an option. Of course, to do so would mean she’d have to cop to a blackmail scheme, but she figured that to be the least of her problems. Allison feared that telling the authorities what she knew could get her killed.
So she kept moving. Starting with her flight from her apartment.
The second Allison Fitch saw what had happened in that bedroom, that someone had been sent-clearly-to kill her and had murdered Bridget Sawchuck by mistake, she just ran. She came out onto Orchard so fast, passersby could have been forgiven for thinking there’d been a gas explosion. She ran south for no particular reason except that if she’d gone north she’d have had to dodge a group of five middle-aged women blocking the sidewalk as they all tried to share one Fodor’s book. She turned west at the first corner, then north at the next, west at the one after that, running flat out, going in a different direction at every cross street, her only goal to elude whoever that woman was who’d killed Bridget.
She turned, abruptly, into a coffee shop. She had no idea what street she was on. As she flew past the counter she shouted, “Latte, medium,” so no one would give her a hard time about using the bathroom, looked desperately for a sign that would tell her where it was, and instinctively descended a set of narrow brick steps to the basement. Found it, tried the door. It was locked.
