“No, he didn’t. I’m sure.”
The woman asked bluntly, “You know where he is?”
“No, but—”
“Then he could have 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.
37
Jon Merritt lay in the rickety, creaking bed.
He squinted as the sun blasted through the torn curtain of the motel window and ignited a thousand dust motes that were parading slowly in the still air.
The Bulleit bottle had left a mark on his side, as he’d slept partially atop it. This put him in mind of his father, who on more than one occasion had fallen asleep with a bottle propped up next to him in his green Naugahyde armchair while watching sports. He would return home, announce, “Time to fire the sunset gun,” and pour his first of the night. Once, he woke in the morning, still in the chair, enraged that the bottle had emptied its contents into his lap. This somehow was Jon’s fault. Out came the belt.
Rolling upright, then out of bed, Merritt now struggled to the bathroom.
Puking? He waited.
No.
Thank you...
He showered then dressed, slipped his gun into one windbreaker pocket, loose shells into another and gathered up the half of Allison’s papers and notes that he hadn’t reviewed last night and stuffed them into the backpack.
He stepped outside into the tidal wave of sun.
At the convenience store Merritt bought a breakfast burrito and a black coffee and walked to the small park overlooking the river. Well, not so fragrant here, but it was good to be outside.
Merritt ate his breakfast. Tentatively at first, then with gusto. No nausea now. He sipped the coffee and then eased back and closed his eyes, bathed with a warmth that went beyond the excited electrons of the sunlight bearing down on him.
He allowed himself this sensation for only a few minutes, though.
Back to the task at hand.
He pulled out his phone, replenished the minutes, and went to the internet. He scanned once more for Allison’s and Hannah’s names on social media and found nothing active.
Slipping the phone away, he turned to the documents from his ex’s house. On top were Hannah’s assignments, poetry and selfies. Another Post-it about Kyle. Some with dates and initials. He flipped through the photos. Were one or two taken at an inn, a campground, a friend’s house they might have fled to? No. Just moody pictures taken by a moody adolescent. He read through her poems until he realized there was nothing helpful there either.
He turned to the stack of Allison’s papers. After five minutes he found something that snagged his attention.
It was an envelope addressed to Allison, postmarked a month ago. It bore a return address he didn’t recognize. Inside was a greeting card. On the front was a watercolor of two butterflies hovering over a daisy. He read the inked message inside.
Ah, good, the detective within him thought. Very good.
He slipped this into his windbreaker pocket, rose and adjusted the gun on his hip. He then started back to his motel room.
He found himself thinking of the picture on the front of the card the woman had sent Allison, the delicate watercolor. The flitting insects.
Merritt remembered, long ago, seeing a TV special about butterflies. The commentator had said that, yes, they were beautiful, they possessed the navigation skills of GPS, they had the energy and wherewithal to migrate hundreds of miles.
There was another fact about the creatures that few people knew, and that Jon Merritt had found amusing: in addition to those nearly miraculous skills, butterflies were also ruthless and aggressive cannibals.
38
Colter Shaw sat in an armchair upholstered sometime in a prior decade, if not century. Comfortable, though, he had to admit.
He was in a small room, in a small motel, not far from the Kenoah. This was the address that Mack McKenzie had uncovered for him.
The view was of a parking lot. Two homeless — men, he believed — slept against a warehouse wall. A woman in the sex trade smoked and eyed passersby.
Shaw thought of the Street Cleaner, the serial killer. These would be prime targets.
Did the man feel that it was less immoral to kill the marginalized?