“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do my best.”
“Anything she’s said or done that makes you think she wants to change directions?”
Her heart sped up again. If she told him, what would that mean for Caitlin? If she didn’t…
Wouldn’t Gary already have an idea? She couldn’t be his only source of information.
If she lied, he’d know.
“Mostly… I think she wants to make a change in her life. Doing Safer America, it’s almost like she’s constantly reliving what happened to her. I think maybe she’s ready to try and be someone other than the tragic victim.”
Gary frowned. “We’re going to have to keep an eye on that.”
She felt that sickening plunge in her gut, the one that came with a betrayal. But there was nothing she could have said that wasn’t a risk.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Keep me posted. If Caitlin starts to go off the reservation, let me know.”
“Okay.”
“And speaking of…” He stood up. Slowly. “Next time you get the urge to make a little jaunt like this, you run it by me first. Because if this happens again? I’m really going to start to wonder if you’re being straight with me.”
She nodded. “It won’t happen again.”
“Good. Because you know what? I really like working with you. It’s been kind of a challenge, breaking you in, but I’m having some fun with it.”
He backed toward the door. Paused in the doorway. “Maybe you ought to think about making a change. Leave that old victim behind.”
“That’s what I was trying to do before you fucked with my life,” she blurted out.
“You think too small.” He reached for the doorknob and started to close the door behind him. “Let me know how it goes in San Francisco.”
The door shut.
She stayed where she was. Brought the gun out from under the pillow, her hands shaking. She strained to listen, for doors closing, for car engines starting and tires crunching redwood bark, for signs that he was really gone.
Chapter Twenty
Just after 2 a.m. Whatever Gary had done to the alarm system she doubted she’d be able to fix, but she couldn’t see much point in worrying about it now.
She got up, put on a zippered hoodie and went out to the kitchen. A second wine glass sat on the counter, about a quarter full. That son of a bitch. He’d come into her house, taken his time. Drunk some of her wine and watched her while she slept.
She picked up his glass and hurled it across the room. It smashed against the sliding door and shattered. She stood there, breathing hard, staring at the ruby-red drips running down the glass door and onto the floor.
After a minute or two, she got out a broom and dustpan to clean up the mess.
What she said to Gary about Caitlin, that would have consequences. But then, every moment she worked for Caitlin was a betrayal of a sort.
You’re not loyal to Caitlin, she told herself. You can’t afford to be.
She had to keep her priorities straight.
She needed to figure out what to do with Danny’s logbook.
She’d left it under her pillow, for now. She couldn’t be sure what kind of bugs Gary had planted in the house, if he’d left a spy cam or two behind. But he didn’t seem to know about her trip to retrieve what Danny had stashed in the woods. He didn’t know about the logbook. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have left the house as easily as he did.
He would have made her pay.
That was the only advantage she had right now.
So, act normally. Whatever “normally” was for a person in her situation.
She poured out one last glass of the Chateau Montelena. While she drank that, she dumped the rest in the sink and washed the decanter, rinsed out the bottle and put it in the recycling.
After that, she took a quick shower and changed into a fresh T-shirt and the light pair of slacks she’d worn on the trip from Houston, and layered on the hoodie. Went back into the kitchen and put on some coffee. She drank a half a cup and poured the rest into a travel Thermos for the drive to the airport.
It was 3:15 a.m.
Now for the logbook.
The ruck and the tote were still sitting by the bed, the tote between the bed and the ruck.
Make the bed, she thought. You wouldn’t want to leave the house with the bed unmade, would you?
Since she’d slept on top of the covers, she wouldn’t need to do much, just tidy the sheets and blankets and put the comforter on top. She tossed the pillows onto the floor, the two on Danny’s side, and then the two on hers, first the extra and then one she’d slept on, and with that, the logbook.
She tugged and straightened the covers, spread out and smoothed the comforter over them. Retrieved Danny’s pillows and propped them up against the headboard. Then went to her side of the bed to do the same. She stood close to the wall and prayed that if anything was watching, her body hid what she was doing.
She grabbed the top pillow and put it on the bed, against the headboard. There was the logbook, sitting on top of the other pillow. As she grabbed the pillow with one hand, she picked up the logbook with the other and slipped it into the laptop compartment of her leather tote. Took in a deep breath and placed the second pillow on the bed.
3:22 a.m. Still too early to leave, unless you had a reason to flee.
She forced herself to drink some more coffee. Brushed her teeth. Walked into the living room. Every creak in the house seemed magnified. She could hear the wind in the redwoods, the seeds and needles falling from the canopy to the ground, sounding almost like rain.
Enough. It was time to go.
She was early, even after stopping at an ATM to deposit $3,000 to her Emily account and dropping off the rental car. Arcata/Eureka was a small airport, looking something like a Holiday Inn lobby version of a rustic lodge, and there wasn’t much of anything on the post-security side to do. The one restaurant here was on the second floor pre-screening. But she wanted to get this over with, now, while there wasn’t much a line.
She carried Danny’s logbook in her tote, $4,376 cash in her wallet.
Her Michelle phone in its signal-blocking bag, her Michelle driver’s license and two credit cards, the two fresh passports, one of the $10,000 bundles of cash, all those were stashed in the interior pockets of the Patagonia jacket she’d packed at the bottom of the ruck.
If they searched her bags…
You got through Gary, she told herself as she approached the TSA officer. You can get through this.
She smiled at the TSA officer, a young man who looked very bored. “Good morning,” she said, and handed him her Emily license.
He looked at it, looked at her, scribbled something on her boarding pass and waved her through.
The x-ray line.
She put the ruck down first, then her shoes and hoodie, her iPad, and finally, her tote. She didn’t want to be separated from that tote any longer than she absolutely had to.
Don’t stare at the woman stationed at the x-ray monitor, she told herself. Just walk into the scanner when they tell you to. Stand on the yellow footprints. Raise your hands above your head, like a criminal, as the curved plastic door slides shut.
Wait.
The door opened, and she walked out the other side.
“Ma’am?”
It was the TSA officer stationed on the other side of the x-ray machine.
“I’m going to need you to open this bag.”
The ruck.
Oh Christ, she thought. Her heart pounded. She was sure that if he looked, he could see the pulse in her throat.
“Sure,” she said.
She unzipped the main compartment. He gestured at the camera bag, packed on top of the jacket. “Open that, please.”
She did. Oh, Christ, the money in the camera bag. Why had she packed it? Why couldn’t she have just let it go?
“Turn on the camera.”
She switched it on, and it booted up.