Sliver of Truth (29 page)

I found that I had about two thousand pounds sterling in my bag, close to four thousand dollars. How it got there, I had no idea. We parked the Peugot in a public lot and then checked into a run-down hotel near Charing Cross Road. The room was ugly but clean and comfortable enough, and Dylan insisted we chill there for a while, wait for the sun to go down. He washed and rebandaged my wound with great tenderness. I let him, though I could have done it myself. Since our kiss on the road, there’d been a charged silence between us. We spoke to each other politely or not at all.

I was eager to get to an Internet café but saw the wisdom in waiting for dark. Plus, I was feeling worse and weaker by the minute. I lay down on the queen-size bed, which smelled vaguely of cigarettes. Dylan took the chair beside me and turned on the “telly.” After an hour of watching the news, we still hadn’t seen anything about ourselves. A check of the morning papers in the lobby on the way in showed that we hadn’t made the print media, either.

“It’s weird,” said Dylan, looking at me from the chair. “I’d have thought our pictures would be all over the place after a mess like that.”

“Maybe they want to keep it quiet.”

“No way. Two cops and a nurse dead? Whoever I killed lying on the hospital room floor? You missing? No way to keep that quiet. They should be using every resource at their disposal to find us.”

“But they did keep it quiet. Obviously.”

He had his head in his hand and rubbed his temples.

“You can lie down if you want,” I said. I thought he must be tired, every muscle in his body aching from driving and sitting up all night.

He looked up at me. “Yeah?”

I nodded. He rose from his chair and lay down beside me. The bed squealed beneath his weight. I moved into him and let him fold his arms around me. I heard him release a long, slow breath, felt the muscles in his chest and shoulders relax. I just wanted to feel safe for a minute. And I did. I drifted off like that. When I woke again, the sky outside our window was darkening.

He was sleeping soundly, his breathing deep and even. My head was on his shoulder and he had one arm curled around me, one flung over his head. I flashed on how his face had looked in the car when he talked about Max, about the things he’d said. How the pain of it had brought tears to his eyes. I hated what he had told me. I felt as if the knowledge was a cancer growing inside me, something black and deadly that would eventually take over and shut all my systems down. I would die from it; I was sure of that.

I remembered Max’s parade of call girls, women I had always naively thought were his girlfriends.
A man like that, so damaged inside,
my mother had said once of him,
can’t really love. At least he was smart enough to know it.
Did she know how much worse it really was? She couldn’t have. She couldn’t.

In the file there’d been a list—a kind of time line. I’d quickly passed it over because I didn’t understand it. I realized now with horror what it was. I slipped myself away from Dylan and went over to the pile of our things on the chair. The file was there beneath my bag. I sat cross-legged on the floor and opened it in my lap, flipped through its leaves until I found what I was looking for. It was a time line, apparently compiled by the FBI’s Serial Crimes Division in cooperation with Interpol, of a list of women found murdered, perpetrator unknown, organized by date and geographic location. It started in Michigan in the ghettos surrounding Michigan State, where Max went to college. Four women, streetwalkers, were found over the four-year period Max resided in that area. One: Emily Watson, seventeen, found in an alleyway beneath some bags of trash behind a Chinese restaurant. Two: Paris Cole, twenty-one, found beneath a bridge over the Detroit River. Three: Marcia Twinning, sixteen, found in a drug den in downtown Detroit. Four: Elsie Lowell, twenty-three, found in an empty lot, her body partially burned. The list went on. Women in New York, New Jersey, London, Paris, Cairo, Milan—around the country and around the world—with two things in common: the brutality of a beating death and the fact that Max was in the area around the time of their murders. Young women, lost women, walking the streets, fallen upon by a predator and left like trash. I noticed that the list ended the year Max died.

I felt my stomach churn, even as my mind clouded with a thousand questions. What did it mean precisely that these deaths corresponded with Max’s passage through the world? Surely you could compile a list like this for almost anyone. People were murdered every day in a thousand different ways all over the globe. And if, in fact, there was any real evidence that he’d murdered these women or that he’d been involved in criminal enterprise with any of the people in the photographs, why wasn’t he ever arrested? Why wasn’t he ever charged? They didn’t seem to have any difficulty finding and following him.

“You want to talk about some of that?” Dylan asked from the bed, startling me.

“No,” I said. “I’m tired of talking.” I felt as if we’d been talking for days.

There was so much I didn’t know and didn’t understand, so many things that didn’t make sense with the information I had. And I always had Jake in the back of my mind. Where was he? What had happened to him? How much of our life together was a lie, a fabrication on his part to be close enough to me to know if Max was still alive? How much of what was in this file did Jake already know? I thought of his own file he’d shown me, the one that had disappeared after the last time we made love. I wished I had paid more attention to what was in there.

I heard Dylan sit up and crack his back. He issued a low groan and I turned to look at him; he was clearly in pain. Looking at him made me think of Jake again. They were such different men but driven by the same desire to find my father. It was weird, karmic in a way. I knew there was a lesson for me to learn here, but I was miles away from understanding. He rested his gaze on me and I felt an odd wash of attraction and guilt. I looked away.

“What do you want to do?” he said softly.

“I need some clothes. I can’t go clubbing like this,” I said, looking down at my pilled blue sweater and ugly, too-tight jeans. I’d unzipped them to spare my injury any additional discomfort, but I couldn’t very well go running around London with my pants open.

16

We went to Knightsbridge for some new clothes for me, using the cash I’d discovered in my bag. Dylan trailed around after me, edgy and watchful, while I, in under an hour, got myself a pair of black jeans and a black suede jacket at Lucky (ripped and faded and beat to hell for a ridiculous sum, but oh so fab), a pair of pull-on Doc Martens boots (think skinhead chic), and a ribbed black lightweight sweater with a zip-up neck at Armani. I felt better after shopping, more normal. And more than that I looked cool, which almost made up for being in mortal danger, an international fugitive, and a partial amnesiac.

You’re thinking it was an unlikely time for me to be shopping, that there were bigger fish to fry. And you’re probably right. But sometimes you have to pull yourself together on the outside to pull yourself together on the inside.

My hair was growing on me, figuratively speaking, though I wondered if I should change it again. I opted for a ski hat and sunglasses instead. It’s pretty traumatic to cut and dye your hair if you’ve never done anything like that, and I’d had enough trauma to last me a while.

Besides, since I hadn’t seen myself on television or in the papers, I’d lulled myself into a false sense of security that we wouldn’t be spotted by the police. Of course, I managed not to think about the fact that there were probably more dangerous people looking for me. Who knows, maybe I wanted to get caught. I was feeling pretty low, pretty disconnected from myself. I think
numb
is a good word for it. I was numb—except for the injury in my side, from which radiated a low-grade pain controlled somewhat with whatever pills Dylan was giving me.

The Internet café we found back near the hotel was also a pizza place, so we ordered a pie and found ourselves a quiet booth toward the back. A laptop hummed on each table and the room was filled with the weird blue glow of computer screens. It was pretty quiet, not too many other surfer diners. A young girl with a pile of textbooks and a sad face sat a few tables away from us, sipping from a mug and staring absently into space. A middle-aged man in a beige cardigan and thick glasses moved his mouth as he read something on the screen in front of him. He sat near the door. All the other tables were empty, and for that I was glad.

“I wonder if this is a good idea,” said Dylan as I started to tap on the keyboard. “They’re likely watching your account. They’ll be able to tell where you accessed your e-mail.”

“How long would that take them?”

He shrugged. “Could take a while.”

“Then we’ll be gone by the time they figure it out.”

I assumed he was talking about the FBI, but maybe he meant the other people looking for Max, too. He’d said,
Max Smiley picked a good time to die. People felt robbed.
He hadn’t really expounded on who else might be looking for Max and why. I asked him about it.

“A man like Max makes enemies,” he said vaguely. “The people he dealt with would look for revenge. You’re his daughter. It wouldn’t take them long to come to the same conclusion that everyone else did, that you’re the way to him.”

“I get that,” I said, thinking about the men in the Bronx. “But who?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. . . . The Albanians, the Russians, the Italians. The families of women he might have murdered. There’s a catalog to choose from.”

I noticed Dylan kept scanning the room as he spoke, kept peering at the street outside the café window, glancing toward the door. He was edgy.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. It just seems strange that there doesn’t appear to be any kind of search for us,” he said, repeating his earlier concern. “It seems like a damn big news story, doesn’t it?”

He was right, of course. An American woman appears in London, no record of her travel, a gunshot wound in her side. Someone removes her from police custody at a hospital, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Now she’s missing, a victim or a fugitive, no one’s certain. A rogue FBI agent, broken away from his agency, is also missing, and may be her suspected captor or rescuer or accomplice. Big news story. Irresistible, in fact.

Outside our window, two uniformed bobbies strolled by, their faces blank and bored. They didn’t exactly seem to be on red alert, but Dylan tensed until they passed.

“Would you feel better if our faces were all over the place and we couldn’t make a move?” I asked. “If we had no choice but to turn ourselves in?”

“In a way? Yeah. At least that would seem in line with the circumstances. I just have a weird feeling,” he said, the British accent returning just slightly. It was funny that I knew him well enough now to know that he was stressed.

I logged into my e-mail account, then slid over to Dylan’s side of the booth and turned the laptop around so that he could see. As I moved in close to him, he dropped an arm around my shoulder and I felt the hard metal of the gun at his waist. I’d forgotten he was carrying a weapon and it reminded me how screwed up everything was. I found myself wondering if he was right, if we should turn ourselves in. Jake’s words at the Cloisters came back to me. I think he was trying to say that maybe we didn’t need to understand the past in order to have a future. We didn’t necessarily need to know where we’d come from in order to move ahead. Was he right?

I explained to Dylan what Grant had told me about the website with the red screen, how messages could be hidden in pieces of unused data. I described Spam Mimic, how messages that appeared to be spam could also be alerts to log into the website.

“You think your father was using this to communicate with Max?”

“It seems like a fair guess,” I said. The thought made my chest constrict with anger, but I couldn’t think about any of that now.

I scanned through the multiple spam messages on my account. I expected to see something from Ace but there was nothing. If he knew the trouble I was in, he didn’t care. A message from my parents dated three days ago told me that they were in Corsica. They raved about the food. Unbelievable. I suspected that they might be on their way home by now. After sorting through the rest of my mail, I saw a message from Grant. I clicked on it immediately. It read:

The e-mail was sent at 7:03
P.M
. Dylan and I both knew that an hour later Grant was dead. It was my fault and I felt the full weight of that as I read and reread his note. Part of me hoped that there would be a message encrypted within his words, but even if there was, I’d have no way to decipher it. I fought off tears, ate a piece of the pizza that had been delivered to our table while I reread Grant’s e-mail yet another time.

“Everybody who has attempted to log into that site is either dead or missing,” said Dylan. “Myra Lyall, Sarah Duvall, Grant Webster, and Jake Jacobsen.”

I nodded. “Everyone except for Ben,” I said.

I remembered the address of the website and typed it into the browser. The red screen popped up seconds later.