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 shehadto 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 bookDiscussion of the Methoda 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 stuckwith 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.”