Kill Me (33 page)

SIXTY-FIVE

Lizzie found a cell phone in Carrie Belvedere’s purse. As soon as we were close enough to the city of Georgetown to be in reliable contact with a cell tower, I used the phone to call Mary’s mobile.

“Hey, it’s me. Did you capture this number when I called?”

“Yes.”

“Call me back on a land line.” I hung up.

Twenty seconds later, the tiny phone burst into the opening melody of “Material Girl.” We were a half mile down valley from Georgetown by then. I had just started trying to coax Lizzie’s eyes to see through the natural camouflage so she could spot a small cluster of bighorn sheep that was perched halfway up the almost vertical cliff face above the other side of the interstate.

Even with my help Lizzie couldn’t find the sheep. Picking out bighorns in their natural habitat is like solving a perceptual puzzle. The first time it’s almost impossible to discern their still shapes out of the rocks and grass and dirt. But after that first time it gets easier. You quiet your eyes, do some concentration/perception thing that’s a combination of Zen and gestalt, and suddenly — there they are.

The harsh canyon habitat where the sheep thrived made the cell signal crappy, but I was grateful for any coverage at all on this stretch of I-70.

Mary asked, “What’s up?”

“Are you at Centennial?”

“Yes,” she said. “The plane should be ready in about an hour. I’ll take her wherever you want, whenever you want. But you know I can’t fly into Telluride at night. That will have to wait until morning.”

“No problem. There’s a change in plans. Ready?”

“Go.”

“Good. This is what I’d like you to do.”

Lizzie never found the sheep. I wondered if she’d have a second chance. Ever. I assumed I wouldn’t get another chance to coach her through it.

I waited until we were passing the Highway 40 exit that led toward Berthoud Pass and Winter Park before I said, “You were going to tell me about the magazines.”

“I was?” she said. “It’s funny, I’ve never told anybody about the magazines. Not that anybody’s ever asked.”

I touched her leg. “The magazines are your Adam,” I said. “Aren’t they?”

She inhaled in a little gasp.

“I did my oncology residency in Texas. At Baylor,” she said as we were entering the canyons west of Idaho Springs. “That’s where I met my husband.”

Those mundane revelations seemed to exhaust her. I waited almost a quarter of a mile for her to continue. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “Tell me.”

“We married. Had two kids. Two girls.”

Had. Two girls.

“My husband is, was, from Jordan. He is a not-too-distant relative of the royal family.”

“Yes?” I said.

“That’s important, that he’s from … overseas. And that he’s … connected.”

“Okay.”

“We moved to Dallas. A lot happened between us. Most of it wasn’t good. But none of it was particularly unusual. It was a marriage that was dying in one of the normal ways that marriages die. One week in the fall, when the girls were four and two, I went to New Orleans for a short medical conference. When I came home, they were gone.”

“He took your girls?”

“He took my girls. He took them to Jordan.”

“To Jordan?” I repeated her words so I could buy time to look ahead. To anticipate where she was going.

“Initially, yes, I think. He never contacted me again, so I don’t know for sure. But later, after I joined the company, I was able to get hold of records showing that the girls went through immigration that week in Amman.”

“There aren’t any treaties with Jordan? To bring them back here? What about custody and —”

“Shhh,” she said gently. “I’m thorough. I checked every avenue five times in five ways. It doesn’t matter what the law says or what the treaties say; Roger wouldn’t have stayed in Amman. Never. Not even for the girls. He hated it there. Despised his parents. Where he took my girls next, I don’t know. But he got them new passports; I’m sure of that. New names. Maybe even a new mother. Remember, he’s connected. Me? I’ve spent the last eight years of my life looking … for my girls.”

I slowed as we approached the speed traps in Idaho Springs. The combination of the memories and the intrusion of civilization seemed to quiet Lizzie. Not too far away on the other side of town was the steep hill where I’d encountered the flatbed with the oil drums.

I told myself to focus.

She said, “The magazines?”

It felt like a non sequitur. I said, “Yes?”

“In my work, now, I get a lot of free time. It’s important to me, the free time. I use it to travel. I imagine places he would like to live, places he dreamed aloud about when we were together. He was a restless man, never satisfied, always felt that happiness was waiting for him someplace else. Maybe with someone else. So … I travel to places where I can picture him. Warm places. By a pool. At a golf course. In Scottsdale. Las Vegas. Austin. All over Hawaii. Palm Springs. Ojai. You know Ojai? It’s a long list. Places in Europe, too. But only southern places. Provence. Sicily. Barcelona. Northern Africa, too. Tunisia. Mexico. I’ve been to Costa Rica looking for him. All over Australia. Thailand, too. I went there after the tsunami and looked at the faces of all the dead children.”

“God,” I said.

“When I get someplace where I can see him living, I’m ready with a list of the good schools, the private schools, the best schools — the man I married is a snob — and I wait outside for the kids to go into the school, or later, to come back out. I take pictures. Back in my hotel, I examine every face of every little girl. Trying to find mine. Trying to find my girls.”

“What are their names?”

“Andrea and Zoe.” She smiled. “A to Z.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“The magazines I get all have pictures of children in them. Mostly girls. Pretty girls. Happy girls. Girls on horses. Girls at the beach. Girls dancing. Girls dreaming of being pop stars. I turn pages every night, hoping …” Her voice became almost inaudible. “Hoping.”

I downshifted to begin the climb up toward El Rancho.

“Each day when I leave my apartment, I toss the previous night’s magazines into the trash chute. If I let them pile up, if I let them remind me of the futility, I get hopeless. So I throw them away. I start fresh again each night. New girls. New hope. New faces.”

She fell asleep as we crested the ridge at El Rancho.

I wanted to wake her and comfort her and cajole her into telling me what was going on with my son. I didn’t. I consoled myself that I’d know within a few hours.

There’s no highway to carry traffic north along the Front Range of the Rockies after drivers on I-70 exit the foothills onto the high plains. The closest northbound freeway is I-25, which snakes through the heart of Denver about ten miles east of the mountains — too far away for my purposes that night. Although I would have preferred to stay on a freeway, my best choice from the bad alternatives was to take Wadsworth Boulevard north toward my destination.

Traffic was tolerable, traffic-light timing was acceptable, and Lizzie and I pulled onto the access road to Jefferson County Airport exactly fifty-eight minutes after we had exited the tunnel.

We were early.

I stopped the stolen BMW in the lot of the fixed base operator where I had arranged to meet the plane. Lizzie stirred, saw where we were, and asked me if I had any change. I gave her the coins from my pocket. She jumped out of the car, peeled away, and found a pay phone near the corner of the building. I followed her and eavesdropped. She knew I was listening but she didn’t seem to care. She was calling the laboratory to get the results of my blood work. I watched as she jotted down numbers for most of a minute. All I heard from her end of the conversation was “yes, go on,” “okay,” and “got that.”

“Well?” I asked, when she hung up.

“For now everything looks okay. There are no anomalies in your liver functions. That would be a big concern. But some of what I asked them to look for isn’t done yet. I’ll have to check back with them again in the morning.”

“Why not use your cell phone?”

“You may have noticed that my colleagues are pretty well connected with the mobile-phone network.”

I nodded. “What’s going on with Adam, Lizzie? Please.”

She shook her head. “You’ll leave me behind. I can’t let that happen.”

The Lear from Centennial didn’t land for another ten minutes. I recognized the familiar green spiral on the plane’s tail as it rolled past the midpoint on the runway during its landing.

As the plane taxied to the FBO, I could see through the windshield that Mary was in the right-hand seat.

“That’s our ride,” I said to Lizzie.

She didn’t hear me. She was beside me on the lounge sofa, curled up into a fetal ball. Again, sound asleep.

Mike came out to meet us and got us settled; Mary stayed in the cockpit. The Lear’s nose wheel went aloft at 10:54. Not too long after takeoff Mary came back to the cabin.

She seemed to be focusing an unusual amount of attention on Lizzie, who was on the couch in the back of the cabin.

I gave Mary a big hug and asked her about her cousin. We spoke in whispers.

“She’s doing some deep-sea fishing in the Gulf for a few days. The boat is chartered in my mom’s name. I think she’s safe.”

I liked the plan. “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Flight time tonight? Any idea?” I asked. “How are the winds?”

“Jet stream’s not going to be much help. Weather’s going to be a problem over the Great Lakes. Five hours and change is my current estimate. Could be more if we have to dodge a storm or two. With any luck we’ll get in just before dawn. Given the hurry, we didn’t have a chance to get any catering on board. Are you hungry? I can check the galley for you, see if there’s anything left in there.”

“I’m good,” I said. “I’ll try to sleep.” I motioned for her to sit down across from me. “Do me a couple favors? Don’t worry about turbulence. And avoid the Great Lakes.”

She frowned. But she said, “Okay.”

“How did it go at Centennial?” I asked.

She glanced, again, at Lizzie. “When you called the generator was already installed, and we were just about to run tests on the electrical system. After I talked to you, I told everybody your plans had changed and that we could finish up the next day. If anyone outside was watching us it looked like we were giving up for the night. We locked up the hangar, turned off the lights. Mechanics drove home, none the wiser.”

“How did things go with Jimmy Lee? Any trouble getting the Lear?”

She made a dismissive face. “You kidding? With the offer I made? Jimmy jumped at it. Mike was cool about doing the extra night flight when I told him that there was a thousand-dollar bonus for each leg in addition to a generous layover allowance. I assume you don’t mind.”

Mike was a pilot friend of Mary’s. The Lear, Mike’s baby, belonged to the insurance company that my friend Jimmy Lee worked for in the Denver Tech Center. Mary had arranged to trade flight hours in my Gulfstream for some hours in the Lear. The Lear was slightly faster than the Gulfstream, but my plane was bigger and had better range. I’d told her to offer one and a half G-IV flight hours for one Lear flight hour to sweeten the trade.

It was a great deal for Jimmy’s company. I knew he’d go for it.

“I don’t mind at all. You’ll get the same bonus Mike gets. Tell LaBelle. No one saw the two of you go back to Centennial?”

“When I left the airport I drove over to Mike’s condo in the Tech Center. He lives in one of those high-rises off Belleview, keeps his car in the garage downstairs. You can’t see it from the street. We used his car. I didn’t show my face again until we were in the hangar. If someone followed me, they probably think I’m doing a … sleepover.” She smiled.

“You trust Mike, Mary?”

“Mike’s … good people. Yes.”

“Flight plan for tonight?” I asked.

“The FAA thinks we’re heading to Hartford. It’s one of Mike’s usual routes — all those insurance company headquarters that are there? — so if anyone’s tracking this plane, it shouldn’t raise any suspicion at all; they’ll assume he’s carrying an exec to a morning meeting. In a few hours, we’ll file an amended flight plan. Are you sure you don’t just want us to go into Hartford or one of the New York airports? You can drive to New Haven pretty quickly from some of those fields. I can have a car waiting.”

“No, there’s no time, unfortunately. It has to be New Haven. I don’t think anyone will be able to figure out what we’re doing. There’s no reason for anyone to be watching this plane, right?”

My question was rhetorical.

Her answer — “No, I don’t think so” — wasn’t. She added, “Mike and I will wait for you in New Haven. You know, in case you need to get someplace fast.”

“Thanks, but no. I want you back in Denver. Refuel and then head home. Stay in touch with LaBelle.” I was thinking that Thea might be needing the G-IV.

“Mike and I will have to get some rest before we can head back.”