The Wrong Man (32 page)

He smiled. Should do the trick, he thought.

He’d seen some pretty crazed stalkers in his day, the types that wouldn’t be deterred by threats, the law, or even by brandished weapons—pit-bull types who would walk through a firestorm to get at the person they were obsessed with—but O’Connell seemed to him to really just be a petty criminal, and he had years of experience dealing with his type. What he couldn’t see, the more he read about Michael O’Connell, was why this particular piece of minor-league garbage thought he could screw around with people like Sally Freeman-Richards and her daughter. He shook his head. He’d handled more than one homicide where an estranged boyfriend or husband had taken out his anger on some poor woman just trying to make her way. Murphy had a natural affinity for anyone seeking a way out of an abusive relationship. What he didn’t understand was where the passion came from. In the cases he’d handled over the years, it seemed to him that love was perhaps the stupidest reason for throwing away one’s freedom, one’s future, or, in some cases, one’s life.

Murphy took another look toward the apartment door. “Come on, kid,” he said out loud. “Come on out where I can get a look at you. I’ve got better things to be doing.”

As if on cue, he saw a movement in the sally port to O’Connell’s apartment building and, when he craned forward, immediately recognized O’Connell from the three-year-old mug shots.

He grabbed the camera and focused on O’Connell’s face. To his surprise, O’Connell lingered for a moment, almost facing in his direction. He rapidly snapped off a half dozen frames.

“Got you,” he said out loud, but to himself. Grinning. “You weren’t hard to make.”

What Murphy failed to realize at that moment was that the same was true of him.

It had been an easy call for Scott to make, although the arrangements were a little more complicated. The football coach had been in his office, going over game plans with his defensive coordinator. Scott had met the man on several occasions socially and made a point of attending as many games as he could.

“Coach Warner? It’s Scott Freeman.”

“Scott! Great to hear from you. But I’m a bit tied up right now…”

“Some unbelievably sophisticated defensive plan, designed to befuddle the enemy, rendering him into an ineffectual knot of incompetence?”

The coach laughed. “Yes. Absolutely. We won’t accept anything less than a total emotional meltdown by the opposition. But surely that’s not why you called?”

“I need a small favor. Some muscle.”

“Muscle we have in abundance. But we also have classes and practice. The boys are pretty busy.”

“How about on Sunday? I need two, maybe three guys. A very modest amount of heavy lifting, for which I will pay well and in cash.”

“Sunday? That would be okay. What do you have in mind?”

“Actually, Coach, I need to move my daughter out of her apartment in Boston and get her things put in storage. In a hurry.”

“This is the sort of blessedly simpleminded task that we football types are more than capable of performing,” the coach said with a laugh. “Okay. I’ll ask for a couple of volunteers today after practice, send them around tomorrow.”

The three young men who showed up at Scott’s office door the following morning were all huge and eager to make some extra cash. He rapidly explained that the job would consist of picking up a rental truck on Sunday morning, driving to Boston, packing everything in the apartment into cardboard boxes, and putting all the stuff in a storage facility just outside the city that he’d already arranged for.

“Need to get this done right away,” Scott said. “No delays.”

“What’s the rush?” one of the boys asked.

Scott had anticipated the question. He had spent some time thinking precisely about what he wanted the three young men to know. Not the truth, certainly.

“My daughter is a grad student in Boston. Some time ago, she applied for some sort of grant to study abroad. Didn’t think anything of it, but lo and behold, it just showed up the other day. But there’s some sort of time restriction. Anyway, the upshot of the whole deal is that she’s off to Florence to study Renaissance art for six to nine months. She’s got to be on a plane in the next few days. And I don’t want to end up paying for her apartment any longer than I already have to. I’m going to lose the security deposit, as is. Ah, well,” he sighed with exaggerated drama. “If you like all those pictures of martyred saints and beheaded prophets, I guess that’s where you’ve got to go. But I’m not imagining that the word
job
or the word
career
currently has much to do with my daughter’s approach to life.”

This caused the young men to laugh because it was something they could identify with. They made the final arrangements, and Scott told them he’d see them Sunday morning.

As the door closed, he thought, if anyone asks them, they will answer, gone. Out of the country. A credible story. Florence. They will remember that.

It was just a guess on his part, but he suspected a good one, that there would be one person who, assuming he spotted the three movers, would be most interested in the story Scott had so carefully planted.

Ashley felt a little ridiculous.

She had jammed a week’s worth of clothing into a black duffel bag and a second week’s worth into a small suitcase with rollers. The day before, the Federal Express deliveryman had arrived with a package for her from her father. It included two different guidebooks to cities in Italy, an English-Italian dictionary, and three large books about Renaissance art. Of these three, she already owned two. There was also a handbook put out by his own college called
A Student’s Guide to Study Abroad.

He had written up a brief letter, using his computer to make up an impressive masthead from the fictional Institute for the Study of Renaissance Art welcoming her to the program, and giving the name of a contact when she arrived in Rome. The contact was actually real—a professor at the University of Bologna whom Scott had once met at a historical conference, and whom he knew was on a yearlong sabbatical, teaching in Africa. He didn’t think Michael O’Connell would ever be able to find him. And, even if he did, Scott had decided that mixing something fictional with someone real would at the very least be confusing. This, he had thought, was clever.

This letter was to be left behind by Ashley, as if forgotten by accident.

His directions for what she was supposed to do beyond leaving the fictional letter behind were detailed and, she thought, a little over-the-top. But he had made her promise that she would do precisely as he instructed. Nothing he was suggesting was truly out of line, and it all made eminently good sense, because to achieve what he wanted, some deception was in order.

One of the guidebooks was to be placed in an outside pocket on the duffel bag with the title protruding out, so that anyone who saw her carrying it couldn’t help but notice it. The other books were to be left around the apartment, so that they would be packed, although Scott urged Ashley to arrange them prominently on her desktop and bedside table.

The next-to-last call she should make, before calling the telephone company and canceling her landline service, was to a taxi company.

When the cab arrived, she was to lock her apartment and place the key on the lintel above the outside door, where the football movers could easily find it.

Ashley looked around at the place that she’d come to regard as a sort of home. The posters on the walls, the potted plants, the dingy orange shower curtain, had been her own, and her first, and she was surprised by how emotional she suddenly felt about the simplest of items. She sometimes thought that she wasn’t yet sure who she was, and who she was going to become, but the apartment had been a first step toward those definitions.

“God damn you!” she said out loud. She did not even have to form the name in her mind.

She looked down at her father’s handwritten note. All right, she said to herself. Might as well play it out.

Then she went to the phone and dialed a cab.

She waited nervously right inside the apartment-building door until the taxi arrived. Following her father’s suggestions, she was wearing dark sunglasses and a knit hat pulled down over her hair. Her jacket collar was turned up.
Look like someone who doesn’t want to be recognized and is in the process of running away,
he had written her. She was a little unsure whether she was acting, as if on a stage, or behaving reasonably. As the taxi rolled to a stop in front of her building, she hurriedly stepped through the doorway and placed the key where her father had told her to. Then, head down, looking neither right nor left, she burst forward, acting as rapidly and as furtively as she could, still assuming that Michael O’Connell was watching from some location. It was early in the afternoon, and glare from the sun shredded the cool air around her, casting odd shadows into alleyways. She tossed her suitcase and duffel onto the seat, then threw herself in behind them.

“Logan,” she said. “International departures terminal.”

Then she lowered her head, scrunching down in the seat as if hiding.

At the airport, she gave the driver a modest tip and made a point of saying, “Italy. I’m going to Florence. Going to study abroad.” She was unsure whether he understood anything she said.

She rolled her bags into the departures arena, her steps punctuated by the constant roar of jets taking off above the harbor waters. There was excitement in the lines of people checking in. A hum of conversation, in all sorts of languages, filled the space. She glanced toward the exit gates, then she abruptly turned and headed to her right, to a bank of elevators. She fell in close with a crowd that had come off an Aer Lingus flight from Shannon, all redheads, white-skinned, speaking rapidly in accented tones, wearing the distinctive green-and-white-striped Celtic jerseys, on their way to a big family reunion in South Boston.

Ashley found a little space in the back of the elevator and quickly opened up her duffel bag. She stuffed her knit cap, fleece jacket, and sunglasses inside, removed a maroon Boston College baseball cap and a brown leather overcoat, changing swiftly, thankful that the other passengers, if they did notice what she was doing, seemed to think nothing of it.

She exited at the third-story walkway to the central parking garage. In the gray, shadowy parking area, smelling of oil and punctuated by high-pitched squealing sounds from tires on the circular ramps, she rapidly made her way across to the domestic terminals. She followed the signs toward the bus connecting to the T station.

Only a half dozen people were in the subway train compartment, and none of them were Michael O’Connell. There was no chance, she thought, that she was being followed. Not any longer. She began to feel excitement and a heady sense of freedom. Her pulse increased and she realized that she was smiling, probably for the first time in days.

Still, she elected to follow her father’s instructions, thinking, They may be crazy, but I think they’ve worked so far. She got off the train at Congress Street and, still dragging her two bags, walked the few short blocks to the Children’s Museum. Inside the entrance, she was able to check her bags and buy a single ticket. Then she rose up into the meandering maze of the museum, wandering from LEGO room to science exhibit, constantly surrounded by giggling squads of fast-moving children, teachers, and parents. She stood in the midst of all sorts of happy, excited noises and immediately understood the logic behind her father’s plan: Michael O’Connell would have been unable to hide in the museum, despite the angles, stairs, and slides that filled it. He would instantly have stood out as wrong, where Ashley immediately became no different from any preschool teacher or mother’s helper, making her slow and exhausted way through the crowds in the museum.

She checked her watch, still keeping to her father’s schedule. At precisely 4 p.m. she retrieved her bags and exited directly into one of the cabs waiting outside. This time she inspected the street carefully for any signs of O’Connell. The museum was located in a onetime warehouse district, and the broad street was open in both directions. She recognized the genius in their choice of the location: no place to hide, no alleys, trees, dark places.

Ashley smiled and asked the cab to take her to the Peter Pan bus station. The driver grumbled—it was only a short ride—but she didn’t care; for the first time in days it seemed, she had lost the sensation of being watched. She even hummed a little as the cab cut through the downtown Boston streets.

She purchased a ticket for Montreal on a bus leaving in less than ten minutes. The bus stopped in Brattleboro, Vermont, before going on to Canada; she would merely exit well before the destination on her ticket. And she was looking forward to seeing Catherine.

The stench of exhaust and grease filled her nostrils as she climbed onto the bus. It was already dark, and shafts of neon blended with the gleaming silver shape of the bus. She found a seat in the back, next to a window. For a moment, she stared out into the growing night and was a little amazed that instead of feeling uncertain and unsettled, she felt almost free. And when the driver slammed the door shut and ground the gears as he backed the bus out of its loading dock, she closed her eyes, listening to the rhythm of the engine, as it accelerated through downtown streets, heading toward the highway, and leaving the city behind. Although it was only early in the evening, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.