“Then hecouldhave followed you. What Jon did to her! Did you see her face?”
Shaw knew her tone and could see where the conversation was going: into a brick wall. He pulled a card from his jacket pocket. It bore his name and burner phone number.
“Call me if you think of anything. And if Alli calls you, have her check her email. There’s one from her mother she should read.”
He slid the card under the screen door.
Odds it was destined for the trash in thirty seconds?
Eighty percent.
In the reward business, Colter Shaw had learned that one of the largest demographic groups in the world is the Uninvolved.
“I have to go now,” Holmes said, and the door closed. She hadn’t picked up the card.
He heard the deadbolt and the chain secure the door, then walked back to the bike and fired it up.
He put to use the second name and address, but the meeting was a virtual rerun.
As was the next. There was no occupant at the fifth house—or at least no occupant willing to open the door to a stranger.
At the next locations he found friends more sympathetic than the others. But those he spoke with said they knew nothing helpful, and he sensed they were being honest.
When he ran out of individuals he had addresses for, he turned to the phone list. Sitting on the Yamaha in a Walmart parking lot, his notebook balanced on the gas tank, he made the calls. Four of the six picked up. There was an element of suspicion on their part, though mentioning Ruth Parker’s name allayed this to some extent. No one had any idea where Allison might have gone. One, a man who was a former neighbor, volunteered that Jon Merritt was unstable and dangerous. He’d gotten drunk at a block party and fought with a guest over a perceived slight.
“Man is a damn bully.”
He’d left messages for the two he hadn’t been able to reach and wondered if he should call again.
But then decided: no, no. This was pointless. He was doing this wrong.
Allison Parker, the brilliant engineer, would be brilliant as a fugitive too.
She would have thought out her escape carefully and wouldn’t confide in or seek the help of anyone her ex knew about or could easily find—someone he and Nilsson could easily identify too.
She’d run only to someone or someplace that Merritt would know nothing about.
The strip mall where he sat happened to be on a rise; the street was Humphrey Mountain Road, though that was an exaggeration. The geologic formation jutted from the otherwise flat earth here no more than a hundred feet. Still he could see the flat landscape for twenty miles in all directions. To the north, the industrial heart of Ferrington rose like red-brick tombstones along the sad Kenoah. East, west and south were densely clustered suburbs that ended abruptly, at lines of field and forest that vanished to the Midwest horizon, muted by a gray haze.
Tell me, Allison. Tell me.
Where are you going?
Like all mathematical problems, her methodology of escape would be laughably obvious to her.
And a mystery to most everyone else.
It was then that his phone hummed. He glanced at the screen.
Possible lead re: your request this morning. Motel in Ferrington. Should have name and address in 15 or 20.
This information came not from a local source but from many miles away.
Mack McKenzie.
His private eye was working her magic.
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