“I left you a message about video cameras in Marshall County.”
“Oh, yessir. I called them. Haven’t heard back.” The detective covered the mouthpiece and Shaw heard him speaking in muffled tones with someone else.
Shaw said, “So. This’s a felony investigation now.”
“It is. We have some patrol officers searching the area where his car was found.”
“You assign Homicide detectives?”
“It’s Major Cases here, and we will be.”
Shaw was tired of this. “You haven’t yet?”
“No. But those two patrol officers? They’re veterans. They ran a canvass on Fourth Street, then moved on to the river.”
“You have their report?”
“Not at this time.” Now the voice was not only burdened but resistant.
“You’ll call me if there’re any developments, won’t you, Detective Kemp?”
“I have your card right here, Mr. Shaw.”
They disconnected.
Useless.
Shaw tried the cooling coffee. One sip before his phone hummed again.
“Mack.”
“Get to your computer,” his PI instructed.
He pulled the unit toward him and powered up, his router too.
After a lengthy thirty seconds he said, “I’m on.”
“Check your email.”
The first message was from her. Attached was a screenshot of an Instagram photo. The image was a selfie: a smiling Hannah Merritt, in stocking cap and sweatshirt, gazing at the camera.
The time stamp was about forty minutes ago.
“I thought all their social media was closed down.”
“It was. And it probably took the girl sixty seconds to make a new account.”
Looking over the picture he said, “The background.”
“Exactly.”
That edge rose within him, what he felt when he was after deer or elk and had spotted fresh tracks left by what would be dinners for the next week. Or uncovering the first solid clue that led to a kidnap victim.
Shaw studied the image closely. You could see a town water tower, painted blue — to make it slightly less of an eyesore. There were five letters visible: HILLS.
Mack said, “In your part of the state, north of Ferrington, it has to be Thompson Hills. I pulled Google Earth shots. The picture was probably taken in the back parking lot of the Sunny Acres Motor Lodge. It’s not a chain. Allison could pay cash and give a fake name. Claim she’s on the run from an abusive spouse or lost her ID. A clerk’d bend the rules.”
Shaw typed the motel’s name into GPS.
He was twenty-seven minutes away.
42
Room 306 of Sunny Acres was claustrophobic and funky smelling. Yet, Allison Parker thought, the ladies were making a pretty good go of it. The fragile peace that had emerged this morning was enduring.
The food was on its way. A Disney sitcom glowed from the big-screen TV, one of those that was mostly for kids but had been seeded with somewhat more sophisticated humor for parents forced to oversee.
Parker’s heuristic plan was to stay here for two days and if Jon wasn’t caught by then they’d continue north to their safe house. She texted the owner now, and received back:
Ready and waiting. Keep me posted. Take care...
While they ate, she checked the news on her phone. Nothing about Jon.
She called her lawyer to see if he had learned anything. No answer. She didn’t leave the burner’s number and said she’d call him back. She was irritated that she hadn’t heard from him. He was supposed to be her lifeline to status reports.
Parker opened her laptop and reviewed the deck she was working on. She could be humorous in front of a crowd and always articulate and organized. Marty often tapped her to give presentations to investors and potential customers. Small modular reactors were as complex as equipment got and Parker was known to have the gift of translating the impossibly complicated to layperson understandable.
Would Jon’s escape affect her appearance at the meeting next week?
God, if he wasn’t captured by then...
On the TV, the Disney happily-ever-after ending faded to the credits.
She noted Hannah looking over her shoulder at her mother’s computer. No teen on earth could resist a screen.
“Dope,” the girl said. “Graphics rock.”
Parker moved the mouse pointer over a blue dot on the side of the reactor depicted on the slide filling the screen.
“That’s your thing, the Futvee!”
Parker nodded. Like the S.I.T. the F.T.V. — “fuel transport vessel” — was her brainchild, a proprietary device that contributed to making Pocket Suns unique, and more marketable than most SMRs. Traditionally uranium fuel rods had to be carefully loaded into the core and, when spent, removed just as carefully, all by experts. The trip from the enrichment facility and to disposal sites was always risky. Parker’s Futvee was a self-contained pod that could be mounted and dismounted by any worker and was virtually impervious to damage.
The phone rang. Parker hesitated and then picked it up.
No need to worry. The food had arrived. She walked to the lobby to pay the delivery boy.
In the room once more, she set out, on the bed, the waffles, bacon for Mom, red and blue berries. Real whipped cream and fake syrup. Under the circumstances, the girl’s concern about her weight remained largely on the distant horizon.
There was a coffee for each of them.
Passing her daughter a plastic plate, she glanced at a slide of the S.I.T. trigger. “Hey, want to hear a story? An employee stole one of these. He was a spy. He was going to sell it to a competitor.”
“Stole? No way.”
“Yes way.” She smiled. “Mr. Harmon called me yesterday morning and told me somebody he hired recovered it.”
“The guy who stole it, he was in your department?”
“No. He was IT.”
“Computer people,” Hannah said. “Can’t friggin’ trust ’em. Look at The Matrix... Did you know him?”
“No. He was in Building Five.”
“The new one.” Hannah knew the company almost as well as her mother did. Parker often arranged for the girl to come hang in her office after school. Before November 15 this was to keep her from being home with a drunk, temperamental father. Afterward, it simply made the paranoid mother feel more comfortable her daughter was nearby.
“What happened? The prick got arrested?”
Parker let the language go. “I don’t know.” Not adding that she didn’t have a chance to follow up with Marty about the spy’s fate because just after the S.I.T. was recovered, she and Hannah had had to flee.
“Can’t say your mother has a dull job, huh?” Impulsively she squeezed the girl’s hand and, after a nearly unbearable moment — will she reciprocate or not? — Hannah scooted close and threw her arms around her mother’s shoulders, buried her head against the woman’s neck.
Parker held her tightly and fought to keep the tears at bay.
43
“There.” Moll, in the front seat of the van, was pointing at the Thompson Hills water tower.
The thing stood out like a blue and silver spaceship lording over the stubby fields and low brown buildings of yet another lost mill town.
Desmond squinted it out. “So, the kid was there, in the back, when she took the shot.” He was looking at the lot behind the Sunny Acres motel.
“That sign is like to blind you.” Moll was referring to the big, pink vacancy sign. If you got close, he supposed, you could probably hear it sizzle.