“Let me take a look at that again. Maybe I’ll make a call and we can circumvent the warrant process.”
A pause. Tension rose. So did Merritt’s anger. He controlled it. Just.
“You know, Mr. Jones, it’s probably best to follow procedures. I’ll get started on that paperwork right now, back in the office.”
As he walked to the door, he snagged a timetable. Once in the cab of his truck, he sat back, calculating. She left her house at 2:50. Given that she would drive only slightly over the limit — like he’d done — she could be at the terminal at 3:45 if she came straight here. But he didn’t think this was the case. She’d had no warning that he was out of County. So she’d fled with only the basics. He guessed she’d stopped for money and — what he would have bought if he’d been in her shoes — a burner phone.
So add a half hour. He opened the timetable. What buses left around 4:15? There were two. One terminated in Detroit, the other St. Louis. The Michigan-bound bus was a local, making perhaps three dozen stops along the way. St. Louis was almost an express. It stopped at only four cities before it reached its destination.
Detroit... St. Louis...
Merritt stretched.
He thought back to a case years ago. He’d been working Narc and had been constantly stymied by a ruthless meth user, who was not your typical tweaker. He was brilliant. After robbing and killing a wealthy couple, the wiry skel vanished and no one could find him. This drove Merritt to rage. Finally, he forced himself to calm. He had to think not like the hunter, but like the prey. A week later Merritt kicked in the door of a cheap apartment in South Ferrington and with no little amount of satisfaction shot the man to death. He had, in effect, become the tweaker and realized, in a burst of inspired thought, where he’d gone.
Now his mind tried to get inside his ex’s. Oh, his thinking wasn’t nearly as sharp as it had been once. Could he do it?
Reciting to himself:
Detroit, St. Louis, Detroit, St. Louis...
21
“Funny how men — some men — can have this dark side. You don’t see it. They keep it hidden. Completely camouflaged. Then it’s like a snake striking.” Fingers snapped. “That’s Jon Merritt.”
Allison Parker’s mother, Ruth, was in Denver, speaking via Zoom to Harmon, Shaw and Nilsson, who had volunteered to help, an addition Shaw didn’t mind at all.
The CEO was behind his desk. The other two were on the couch again. When they’d sat their knees had touched and both moved away slightly. They now faced a large monitor on the wall.
Her hair long and brindle-brown and gray, Mrs. Parker was dressed in a dark red-plaid suit, a white blouse. She was in a den or study. Books filled the background. Many were about decoration and interior design.
“Hidden for years,” she continued. “Hid the drinking too. Until he didn’t care.”
Nilsson stared at the screen unemotionally but he believed her eyes flickered at this comment. Shaw wondered if the ex she’d referred to had behaved this way as well.
Mrs. Parker wore a stern gaze. “What kind of man hurts a woman? A husband cheats and you find out. It’s terrible.” She paused for a sliver of a second. “But it’s not physical. What Jon did to her last November...” Her eyelids dipped briefly.
Shaw supposed the laundry list of familial grievances was long, but to him it was irrelevant. They needed to start their search for mother and daughter now.
Harmon had introduced Shaw as a “personal protection expert” — which, in a way, he was. Mrs. Parker accepted this without asking more.
Shaw opened his notebook and turned to a fresh right-hand page, leaving behind his account of the S.I.T. theft, and uncapped the fountain pen. “Her emails? What did they say exactly?”
They were similar, telling each recipient about Merritt’s release and how she and Hannah were going away until he was caught for violating the restraining order and returned to prison. She was concerned he’d use the contacts he’d made as a cop to find her, and so they were staying off all social media and not using their phones or email any longer.
“Are you both sure they came from her?”
“How do you mean?” Harmon asked.
Sonja Nilsson: “It’s her email address and server?”
They both said that it was.
Shaw asked, “And language, punctuation?”
The two seemed perplexed.
Nilsson said, “We’re worried that Merritt sent it himself.”
“You mean he might’ve hurt her already?” Harmon asked, alarmed.
But Ruth said, “No, it was Alli, I’m positive. Her phrasing, you know. And she signed ‘OXOX,’ backward from normal. It was a joke just between us. Jon wouldn’t know that.”
Harmon scanned the email he’d received. “Yes, it sounds like her, the way she writes her memos and emails.”
Nilsson asked, “You emailed back?”
They both had, but she hadn’t responded.
Shaw asked, “Does Allison see her father?”
The woman’s fractured marital status was an easy deduction from her earlier comments.
“Once a year maybe. Not involved. Never was.”
Though, cheater that he had been, he’d never hit his wife.
“So she wouldn’t go stay with him?”
A laugh was the response.
“Any siblings?”
“No, Alli was an only child.”
Taking notes, Shaw pressed on the matter of friends. Success in the reward business — or in tracking in general — relies on people. Web history and car tags and video cams can be helpful but there’s nothing like a human for a source of information. Even if someone lies and swears the missing soul has gone east, if you read people carefully enough, you know he’s headed west.
Ruth thought for a moment and recited the names of several people her daughter had mentioned to her. The information was sketchy. She had no addresses or phone numbers and wasn’t even certain of the last names. Harmon could only offer a few; he and Parker did not socialize much, he explained.
Nilsson asked, “How about any favorite places she might go? Places that her ex wouldn’t know about?”
Her mother looked ceilingward. “She didn’t take vacations much.”
Harmon gave a wan smile. “It was hard to pry her out of the office.”
Shaw asked, “When she did go, any geographic preference? Mountains or forests, beach?”
“We didn’t do outdoors much when she was young. Resorts mostly. Recently? They never went to the beach that I heard about. Disney and Universal, places like that, with Hannah.”
Shaw asked, “Any phobias or aversions to any particular types of transportation or places?”
“You mean, does she get seasick?”
“Or carsick. Anything that might limit the distance she’d travel.”
“No, nothing like that,” Ruth said. “She and Hannah and I drove to some of the Summit ski areas two years ago. No issues, either of them.”
Shaw looked at Harmon, who shook his head. “Can’t help you there.”
“You think she’d know how to go off the grid?”
Ruth told them, “I know she and Jon and Hannah went camping some.” In a wry voice she added, “But that hasn’t been for a while; last I checked there weren’t a lot of bars in the woods. As for living in a tent and catching her own fish? No, that’s not Alli. She’s not one of those survivalist weirdos.”
Shaw kept the smile at bay. “Would she be armed?”
“No, no. She hated Jon keeping his gun in the house. Because of his drinking. And with what happened last November, she wouldn’t have anything to do with a gun.”
Shaw said, “If we’re lucky she’ll check email. Both of you send her a message asking her to call me or Sonja. She’ll remember me from the S.I.T. investigation.”