“Thank you, Detective. You find them, would you call me? I don’t want them in one of your safe houses.”
He laughed. “Safe house. Yeah, right.”
A budgetary issue, Shaw supposed.
Then Shaw’s eyes dropped to the brown accordion folder. The faded white tape on the side read: Merritt. 399407.
“Can I look at that?”
Kemp hesitated. Shaw knew the request was over the line. But he just looked back into the man’s dark eyes.
One of the massive hands slid it forward.
He opened the file and flipped through the contents, which included the investigation and disposition of the aggravated battery from last year. He didn’t think there would be anything helpful in his search for the woman and girl now. He just wanted to see what had happened in the attack.
Colter Shaw was no stranger to violence. He had witnessed it, experienced it and caused it. But the pictures taken of Allison Parker’s face were tough to see. The skin had been cleaned of blood, but there were many dark brown stains on her collar and, if you looked closely, her hair. Most troubling was the damaged symmetry of her face. Merritt had slammed his service pistol into her cheek and cracked it, altering the tectonic plate of the bone.
Equally troubling were the tears, distorting the perfect lenses of her eyes.
He closed the file and pushed it back. He fished a card from his jeans pocket and handed it to the detective. It went not into a drawer but on a spot beside his computer keyboard.
He thanked Kemp again and rose, leaving him to his massive array of files.
Had the meeting been helpful or not?
His answer was: only twenty percent.
Still, sometimes the least likely approaches worked to sterling advantage. So you pursued them anyway.
Fact is.
24
No bus.
That hadn’t happened.
Jon Merritt was at a McDonald’s, the intersection of Cross County and Route 55, absently watching customers come and go.
No bus. His ex had rented a car. He was ninety-five percent positive.
Detroit, St. Louis...
Neither.
She was just like the tweaker he’d killed, coming up with a plan meant to fool everybody.
She’d bought tickets — he knew that from the clerk’s expression — and left the Toyota sort of but not really hidden, and then hiked away from the terminal to one of the nearby car rental agencies. He debated going inside but he decided he’d pushed his fake cop stuff too far. The bus clerk already might have called someone at FPD.
He had parked the truck butt-in, to have a good view of any approaching threat. This was habit. Jon Merritt had made plenty of enemies in his prior life, all the way from those in crack houses to the county building — and beyond. Enemies who would want him dead out of vengeance or, perhaps, for some other reason. Ironic, he now thought. From the early days of their marriage he’d warned Allison to be vigilant and defensive. She surely would be assuming that same attitude to evade him now.
A bite of burger, a sip of soda. Okay, think...
She’s driving. First, how far tonight, and how far tomorrow? And which direction?
It was getting late. He guessed the perimeter would be about a hundred miles from home. She’d stop somewhere in that circle.
As for direction, she’d started north; he assumed she’d keep going that way and Route 55 was the most efficient choice.
Something was in that direction, something that offered protection.
What was it?
Where would a fleeing wife flee to?
Some options came to mind.
Her friends. Likelihood? Not much. He knew most of the people she was close to. Knew too their addresses, or could easily find them. She wouldn’t put them at risk.
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 had fled 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.
The thonk, thonk, thonk might be a bother to some but Moll kind of liked it.
“What’s he doing?”
“Merritt? Following up some other lead.”