Cut and Run (28 page)

“He say anything?” Larson asked. “The one that lived?”

“Unconscious when I seen him,” the chief answered.

The chief pointed a dull toe of a black shoe at Tomelson's nine-millimeter Beretta, partially beneath the bed. He said, “That's a 92FS. Military officers and federal law enforcement.” He looked up at Larson and said dramatically, “I'm going to ask this once and only once. Did you know this white guy?”

“Are you going to give me a name, or should I recognize his piece?”

The big man leaned in close, apparently thinking he might intimidate Larson.

The armoire doors hung open. Larson noticed the TV's remote on the bed and then, to his surprise, a computer keyboard upside down on the carpet.

Larson scanned the room. On the floor, not two feet from the chief's pant leg, a hotel laundry bag hung partially open. He recognized Hope's pants as the ones he'd bought for her at Target.

Had she been abducted? Fled?
He felt his breathing quicken.

Larson needed to find a quick and believable way out of here. He thought the dead man on the floor to be the missing Markowitz guard. The man had hurried to the marina, barely an hour after Hope had checked in. Did the Romeros have someone on the staff of the hotel? Was there some other way they might have learned Hope had checked in?

His eyes returned to the keyboard, wondering what that had to do with anything.

“Room's registered to a couple,” the chief said, studying a piece of paper he'd been handed by a patrolman. “Is this something a U.S. marshal might arrange?” He tried to engage Larson in a staring contest, but Larson wouldn't give him that. “A marshal carrying a 92FS.”

“I carry a Glock myself,” Larson said. He patted his side, indicating the hidden weapon. “So does everyone on my squad.”

“And that squad is . . . ?”

“Based in Washington.”

“The laundry bag contains a pair of women's pants, size four.”

For playing into the stereotype, Waters didn't miss much.

Larson said, “So where is she? If we're looking at abduction—kidnapping—then I'm required to notify the Bureau . . . as are your guys.” It was the only card he could think to play, the threat of federal involvement. He hoped it might buy him an invitation to leave without further questioning.

The chief studied Larson a moment with an unwavering eye. Judging by his breath, the man had been party to a few nightcaps earlier in the evening. “Who'd you say your friends were?”

Larson hadn't said. “The Kempers. They've got a pair of beautiful daughters,” Larson added. “Both married, but things change. I try to keep my toe in the door.”

“As long as it's just your toe,” the chief replied, thinking himself clever.

“Why don't you head back on over to your friends and wait for the morning paper? Might be better for everyone.”

“Better for me,” Larson said.

“You got a card or something?”

Larson did have a card, but it listed St. Louis as his office address. “I'll write it down for you.”

He stepped around a patrol officer who was serving as crime technician and found a magazine. A corner of the back page had been torn off. Larson studied this a moment, finding it of interest. The inn was too classy a place for torn magazines to be lying around.

He scribbled out the main Washington number—Rotem's number—on a subscription solicitation and handed it to Waters.

“You've got business cards right behind your shield,” the chief said, pointing to Larson's chest.

Larson had forgotten he'd hung his shield out, and of course there were also cards in his ID wallet. He quickly said, “And I'd be happy to give you one if you're willing to spend the next three days in Tallahassee going through debriefing.”

“I know who you are,” the chief said.

Larson doubted he had a clue, though many cops associated the Marshals Service with witness protection, so it wasn't impossible. “That makes us even. You're going to get a phone call some time later tonight, tomorrow morning, and you're going to want to talk with me. Call this number first,
before
you make a mistake.”

“I don't take orders from you guys,” Waters said.

“Then take some advice.” Larson said no more. He walked past the man and left the room, wishing he could have taken Hope's pants with him. Wondering if they offered him any clues to what had become of her.

Larson hurried out the back of the hotel, stopped in the middle of the practice putting green, and turned to inspect the roof outside Hope's windows, wondering if he might see her cowering up there, hidden in a shadow. He did not. Plagued by concern, he walked around the street side, leaving the relative quiet of the back to return to the more noisy congregation at the front. Dismayed by the circus atmosphere and not seeing her anywhere, he returned to the rental car.

Only then did it occur to him to check his BlackBerry—silent for the past hour except for his failed outgoing calls—only to realize he'd never turned the ringer back on.

The icons showed he had seven e-mails and two voice messages waiting.

Behind the wheel now, he called his voice mail. Hearing Tomelson's voice was like stopping time.

Larson, it's Tommy. Listen, there's someone nosing around here at the hotel, and I don't like it. I'm going to relocate the package in a little Halloween costume of her own. Call me.

He deleted the message. An automated woman's voice said, “Second message . . .”

Lars . . . It's me.

She sounded out of breath, frightened.

Something's happened. To your friend, I mean. It was horrible. Whatever you do, don't go to the hotel. I'm in a bar. It's a restaurant called Temptation. Green and white, across from a bike rental place. I'll stay here . . .

Her voice paused. He could feel her checking her watch or a clock.

. . . an hour at most. After that, I'm not sure. Call me, or come by.

She paused.

Hurry.

“To delete this message, press seven. To save it, press nine. To reply . . .”

Larson disconnected the call, checked the BlackBerry's message area and saw the two missed calls, the second of which had been made fifty minutes earlier when he'd still been on Tomelson's charter boat. He kicked himself for having left the ringer off.

He called her back as he drove around the tiny village looking for the bike rental place or a green and white awning. This time she answered. They were barely into their conversation by the time he caught up to her outside the restaurant.

She climbed inside. Able to let down the front for the first time in hours, she nearly collapsed. “It's all my fault. I blew it. Miller warned me they could trace me. But I wanted to—”

“Miller?”

“Find somewhere to pull over. We've got to talk.”

Larson drove straight to the public beach. Hope told him about her brief connection with Markowitz through Miller, and Miller's detection of the electronic ping that quickly identified her. She detailed Tomelson's actions in the hotel room. Larson explained the shooting on Useppa, and the setback it dealt them. He indicated the laptop computer at her feet, and Hope got to work as they talked.

“His family should have told us about the grandson,” Larson said. “That explains so much.”

“Markowitz, dead?” She mulled this over, Penny's life in the wind. “He would have kept a disk, a backup of some sort.”

“I looked around. Didn't see anything. Patted him down, thinking it might be a USB disk I'm looking for. Nothing. So I took the laptop.”

“The list will be on the hard drive.” She had the computer running now. “Though in and of itself, that doesn't help us much.”

“It may help others.” Larson wondered about a system that placed the innocent in hiding from killers who remained in open society, the twisted logic in that, and his own willing participation in its perpetuation. Now his flesh and blood was a part of it, and this seemed to him penance for his failure to question the moral authority of such a practice. He'd so readily focused on Hope, and then Penny, that only now did the full importance of stopping the sale of
Laena
hit him. There were not simply tens or even hundreds of Pennys out there, but thousands. Many had hopefully heeded the alarm as Hope had and were now well away from their homes, harder to find. Hundreds? Thousands? But even these still carried an assumed name, and those names were on that list, on credit cards, checks, bank accounts, vehicle registrations, school enrollments. How many would have the wherewithal to drop all that like a stone? How many of the thousands had never seen or heard the alarm? How many were still at risk?

“If you're the Romeros,” Larson speculated, “and you've hidden this old guy away on a remote island with virtually no access, but therefore no escape route either, what protections do you take to make sure someone like me doesn't walk away with the list?”

She thought about it. “If I'm the one in charge, I'd want to see daily progress. And I don't want the only copy of that list in his possession.”

“Exactly.”

Hope suddenly understood. “Follow the e-mail! Markowitz e-mailed the newest part of the decrypted list each morning.”

Her fingers were typing furiously now. The light from the screen washed her face.

“And you're not going to trust something as important as
Laena
with a surrogate,” Larson said. “Not when it's worth tens of millions of dollars. It's got to be e-mailed directly to you. To the Romeros.”

“Follow the e-mail,” she repeated. Her hands paused above the keyboard. “Shit!”

Larson glanced over at her, then back into the darkness of the beach.

“You said there was a techie there with him.”

“That's how it looked,” Larson told her. “A young guy. Nerdy. I can't say for sure.”

“Well, this thing's clean,” she said, slapping the laptop. “That guy's job apparently was not only to monitor Markowitz's progress, but to wipe the files . . . to reduce the chance of
Laena
or those e-mails being lifted if someone like you
did
come along.”

With her finger she drew a line in the condensation on the inside of the car's glass. An old lighthouse at the end of the parking lot threw a dim beacon out to sea, swiping their faces with each pass. She disappeared from him between the pulses.

“So we're screwed?”

“No way to tell yet,” she said. “His e-mails aren't on this machine. He must have erased them as he went. His mail is hosted on a server—another way to reduce the security risk if the laptop was taken. The deleted information may still be on here somewhere, but it will take days, weeks, to drill down in and find it.”

“Then we
are
screwed.”

“Now wait,” she said, as if talking to Penny. “The e-mails would have gone through the same connection. Through the university's grid. Miller's network. That's what Markowitz was telling me about following the e-mails. They leave a digital ID at each phase of transmission. There's no way to completely erase an e-mail once it's sent. It sticks to every server and relay it touches.”

“So Miller can help us.” Larson started the car, a sense of purpose finding him again.

“He read the exchange between me and Markowitz.” She turned her face into the sweep of white light. “My guess is: a guy like him? He's already on it.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

His right eye had not improved. If anything, it seemed to Penny
to have gotten worse. He kept it covered most of the time, and because of this, whenever he turned his head to check the truck's driver's-side mirror he had no sight of the back berth, no sight of her whatsoever. They passed a sign welcoming them to Colorado.

Penny had discerned a pattern. The monster (which is what she called him, ever since he'd killed the poor man who owned this truck) was tired and playing games with his left eye, his one good eye, in order to stay awake. First he looked out the passenger window into the truck's right-hand mirror; then, out the windshield; then out the driver's-side mirror. He returned his attention to the highway for another couple of minutes and then started the pattern all over again. Always the same.

He'd put her onto the comfortable bed in the back, ankles and wrists taped together, but no gag for most of the day. She appreciated having the gag off and didn't say a word, knowing if she did, he'd put it back on. He'd dragged the dead man into some bushes alongside a deserted road well off the highway, late, late at night. She tried her best to forget about that.

She now lay with her knees bent facing the front so she could see what he was doing, where he was looking. Her nose was still thick with clotted blood, badly bruised but not broken. Inch by inch, she moved her knees up closer into her chest, her sock and the broken shard of pottery nearly within reach now.

She slipped out the broken piece and gripped it tightly and sawed at the silver tape, working only for those few seconds he eyed his outside mirror. As the edge of the tape was cut, it tore. He had country music playing. Its sound covered the small sounds of the tape tearing as her ankles came free.

Working her wrists free felt impossible. Twice she dropped the shard of pottery into the bloody sheets, a jolt of panic flooding her until she came to realize he'd all but forgotten about her. He seemed occupied with staying awake and overcoming the pain in that eye.

She waited three more hours for him to pull over, the digital clock in the truck's dashboard seeming slower than ever, the expanse of elapsed time excruciating.

He never stopped at rest areas. He peed or did his business in the woods along empty roads that he'd sometimes take forever to find, driving around on farm roads well off the highway, until for one reason or another he settled on a place. He left the truck and did his stuff first, then returned to collect the Tupperware pot he made her use while he watched—the only time he removed the tape allowing her hands and legs to separate. She never left the truck.