Her mother. Likelihood: not much. Oh, they might take 55 to I-70, then west. But Ruth was over a thousand miles away, a long and risky trek. They’d be exposed on those roads. Too easy to pull alongside and shoot through windows.
Camping out. Likelihood: so-so. As a family, they’d been to a dozen campgrounds. It wasn’t truly roughing it, but Allison knew how to put up tents and cook on camping stoves. The factor gravitating against it was Hannah. At age eight, she’d been delighted. His gut told him the sixteen-year-old that she’d become would veto the outdoors.
A motel in the boonies. Likelihood: high.
A women’s shelter. Likelihood: high. Several times, when he’d been on a bender and had trashed the house, she and Hannah hadfled to one. She’d possibly do the same now. It would be a smart call. Most of them had armed guards, usually off-duty cops.
Friends of hers that he didn’t know. Likelihood: high. This would include people from the office—from which he’d been effectively banned, after several incidents.
Of the three most likely he decided the shelter and unknown friends were the best to pursue. The motel was good in theory but would be nearly impossible to find. Dom Ryan was helping but his contacts were mostly in the beehives of government. Allison would find a non-chain hotel and check in under a fake name, paying cash.
So: shelter or friends.
He ate some burger, drank some soda, debating.
Well, time was critical. He couldn’t do both. He came to a decision. He himself would try to track down any unknown friends. As for the shelter, he’d delegate that job. It was, after all, his money he was spending.
25
Moll leaned back in the driver’s seat of the Transit, watching an optical illusion, four car tires cemented at a forty-five-degree angle, revolving around a vertical pole. They seemed to spin magically.
It was hypnotic.
He and Desmond were in a strip mall parking lot a block and a half from Allison Parker’s rental house on Maple View, where they’d been for hours, after Merritt’s wife and daughter had fled.
The job was on hold as they awaited further instructions.
Which might be incoming at the moment; his phone hummed with a text. He read it, muttered, “ ’Bout time.”
“And?”
He tucked his phone away. “Merritt thinks they might’ve gone to a shelter. We’re supposed to check them out.”
“A... Oh, for battered women.”
“What were you thinking? Tornado?”
Desmond asked, “Why there?”
“She was in one. She might go back. Makes sense... Dawndue.”
The verbal tic could be cheerful. It could also be a minor obscenity.
Neither man was happy that the ex and daughter were on the road.
“That wasn’t very bright of Merritt, spooking them.”
Moll happened to be thinking to his sometimes partner: Or you could’ve gotten to my place on time, and we could have kept the ladies company at their place until Merritt arrived. He didn’t say this, though. What was the point? A moody Desmond was an irritating Desmond.
Moll went online on his iPhone and checked addresses of shelters in the city. He picked the closest one that was north of Ferrington—the direction Merritt had said they were headed. He put the Transit in gear and pulled onto the road.
Desmond was examining a willow branch, bright green, about eighteen inches long. It was fresh and damp and cut smooth at both ends. He began tapping it with the handle of his open SOG locking-blade knife.
Thethonk, thonk, thonkmight be a bother to some but Moll kind of liked it.
“What’shedoing?”
“Merritt? Following up some other lead.”