After five or so miles she had made another fast stop, scattering gravel and flattened cans on the shoulder. Glancing continually in the rearview mirror, she had sent emails to her mother and Marty Harmon, telling them what had happened and that she and Hannah were leaving. She’d be in touch when it was safe. She left a message with David that he’d been to the house — a violation of the restraining order. He could now be arrested.
Finally she responded to her daughter’s earlier comment. “I didn’t do it to be mean. I did it to keep us safe.”
“Safe?”
Parker was not prepared to tell Hannah that her father’s intent was to kill her. She said softly, “Hannah, please. You know his tantrums, all the times he lost control? How mad he was at me for pressing charges? If he’s drinking again, and I’m sure he is—”
“You don’t fucking know that!”
Parker did not, of course, go to “Language!”
“He could make a scene. He could hurt somebody, even if he doesn’t mean to. Or hurt himself. He can’t legally be on our property. He could get into a fight with the police.”
“Maybe he was just coming by to apologize.”
Oh, sure, Parker thought in her most cynical silent voice.
She glanced at the Dell in her daughter’s lap.
Parker had the only router, so the girl wasn’t online... Or was she?
She might’ve bought a pay-as-you-go Wi-Fi with her allowance.
“Are you online?”
“What? No.”
“Turn your screen.”
“Seriously?”
“Your screen. I want to see you’re in airplane mode.”
“How could I get online? You won’t let me have a jetpack. Like everybody else.”
She defiantly turned the computer and for a moment Parker thought she was going to pitch the Dell into her face. Oh, the girl had definitely inherited some of her father’s disposition.
She squinted. It was just GIMP, a photo-editing program like Photoshop.
“I’m sorry. But we need to take charge of this.”
“You’re, like, totally overthinking. You’re the one who said he’s two different people.”
True, she had. Though she’d told Hannah this to leave a portion of the good memories of past years intact. She had not added that multiple personalities were also a defining quality of sociopaths.
She’d meant when he was drinking, but she had also wondered if, even when he was sober, the dark side could eventually come to predominate, and the generous and reasonable persona vanish.
Could a brain’s nature be fundamentally and permanently changed?
Why not? It could be done with real wiring and capacitors; why not with neurons and synapses?
Finally Hannah broke the silence. “Where are we going?”
“I’m thinking about that.”
Parker had yet to work out a destination. Immediate escape had been her priority. Now she drove along the Cross County, old warehouses and developments giving way to grazing land and razored cornfields and dense forests. At Route 55, miles west of Ferrington, she made a sharp turn south, left, and drove five miles to the small town of Carter Grove, where strip malls and a multiplex and a dusty golf course defined civilization.
She parked in one of these malls now, in front of a nail salon. She said sternly, “Wait here. Do not get out of the car.”
The girl gave her a look.
“Hannah.”
“All right.”
Parker snagged a logo-free blue baseball cap from the backseat, tugged it on. She climbed out and, carrying her large brown leather Coach purse, walked around the corner to First Federal Bank. She returned less than ten minutes later, dropping the purse on the floor of the backseat.
Leaving this mall, she pulled into another, anchored by a Target. This time she insisted Hannah come with her. They went inside and Parker bought a burner phone. The clerk, a skinny boy, shot a flirt at Hannah, who vaporized him with a look.
Turning to mom, he said, “The phone, it’s tricky, kinda. I’ll set it up, you like.”
It wouldn’t be tricky at all but he could use his computer to activate the device. She wanted to keep all their existing devices offline.
Fifteen minutes later, they were in the car once more. She started the engine and her eyes went to the Toyota’s navigation screen.
“Is there a way to shut it off?”
The girl’s perplexed look was wildly exaggerated. She only shrugged.
Parker tapped the touch screen a few times but didn’t see a way to disconnect it from the satellite. That probably involved going into the dash.
She asked Hannah, “There’s a bus station in Herndon, right?”
“Bus?”
But Parker remembered that there was. Downtown. She put the SUV in gear and steered back onto Route 55, scattering gravel as, this time, they drove north.
Hannah muttered, “I don’t want to take a bus. They’re gross. Jesus, Mom, what? You think he can track the car? He doesn’t have superpowers.”
Except that, yes, Jon Merritt did.
Her ex-husband had been a decorated and popular Ferrington Police Department detective, sixteen years on the force. He still had plenty of friends at FPD, men who didn’t give a shit about a drinking problem and an arrest for spousal assault. (A desent wife would have got him help you bitch! read one anonymous email she’d received.) It wasn’t impossible that he’d appeal to these friends, on the QT, to peek at server information and highway cameras to track her.
And even more troubling were the contacts he’d made on the other side of the law. She knew that as a cop, Jon had cut deals with some of the most dangerous organized crime bosses in and around Ferrington. Maybe at this very moment he was calling in a favor: Help me hunt down my ex...
And if that didn’t give him the superpowers of a Marvel Comics character, it came damn close.
19
Shaw and Sonja Nilsson walked into the same office they had been in not two hours earlier.
Marty Harmon gestured to the couch.
At the moment he was all edge and sniper. The humor was gone.
The two of them sat and Harmon eased forward in his chair. “LeClaire?”
Nilsson said, “Did just what we thought. Didn’t take the money. Probably called the buyers right after we left to tell them that they have the real trigger.”
Or that’s what he did when he lowered his arms, which was undoubtedly somewhat after Shaw and Nilsson’s departure.
Harmon said, “I talked to our tech department. The GPS is still dark. They’re monitoring it.”
The fake S.I.T.’s tracker was on a timer so as not to be detected on planes. Many passengers didn’t know that pilots could tell if someone was trying to use a mobile phone on an aircraft.
But it was clear that LeClaire was not the first thing on his mind. He absently rubbed a thick finger against the side of his pug nose. “Something’s come up. The engineer who developed the S.I.T.?”
Shaw nodded. “We interviewed her. Allison...”
“Parker.”
The clear-eyed brunette, furious that her “baby” had been stolen, had been helpful in running through procedures for securing the components and the mesoporous nano material.
It was the woman Harmon had described as “brilliant.”
“Alli was married to an abusive husband. Jon Merritt. About a year ago he tried to kill her. Put her in the hospital. Got three years in prison. Only he was released early — this morning. Alli sent me an email saying she was going into hiding, with her daughter. She wouldn’t say where. She probably was terrified he’d find out.”
“She thinks she’s in danger?” Shaw asked.
“Oh, she is. Her lawyer told me she knows something about Jon, his past, something that he didn’t want to get out. And that may have been why he wanted to kill her in the first place.”