You Can't Catch Me

by Catherine McKenzie

“I guess I did.”

  “Your generation, living your life online. Makes it easy picking for the criminal class, I’ll tell you that. Like that Kardashian woman with that robbery in Paris—”

  I cut him off before he goes on another long tangent. “Could you get a warrant to get information on the account she transferred my money to?”

  “I doubt it’s still there. It’s more likely that she transferred it right away to another account, and then another, et cetera. See those numbers there?” he says, pointing to my account statement. “That numbering means it was transferred to an offshore account. Untraceable.”

  So that’s why she needed the ATM cash. If her money’s offshore, it’s probably not as easy as just going to an ATM and making a withdrawal to get access to it.

  “It’s worth trying, though, isn’t it?” I ask with a note of hope in my voice.

  He turns and taps on his keyboard. “There’s nothing in the system under that name. If that is her real name, she doesn’t have any priors.”

  “You have access to the DMV database, don’t you? What about finding the other Jessicas born on my birthday? That’s not a long list.”

  He looks at me over his shoulder. “Didn’t you tell me her driver’s license was from Ohio?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “We don’t have jurisdiction there.”

  “How about the airport? Can you check if she used that name to go through security or buy a ticket?”

  “That’s the TSA’s bailiwick.”

  “I thought that stuff was all connected now, because of 9/11?”

  He gives me a look. “That’s for stopping terrorists. Not catching grifters.”

  I slouch down. “So, you can’t do anything.”

  “I didn’t say that.” He hits print, and his dot-matrix printer starts to buzz. He takes the paper off the printer and puts it at the bottom of a large stack. “I’ve put it in my to-do pile. That’s the best I can do for you right now.”

  “Are you trying to make me mad?”

  He swivels toward me slowly. “Course not, ma’am. I’m simply trying to give you a realistic expectation about what’s going to happen here. I’m sorry it’s not any different.”

  When the ma’am-ing starts, I know I’m done for. I stand to go.

  He hands me his card. “If you learn anything else, you feel free to call me.”

  I take it and stow it in my pocket.

  “You’ll receive the police report by mail in four to six business days.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Good luck to you, Jessica.”

  I thank him again, though it’s not luck I need now.

  It’s Liam.

  Chapter 4

  Enter Liam

  Liam finds me sitting at the bar in Fiddlesticks, not my regular haunt, but a place I started going to a couple of months ago, right before everything started.

  There’s nothing special about this place. A shiny bar top, a mirror along the back wall with gold lettering that’s half-covered by beer bottles and glasses hanging from a rack. Flags of the world paper the ceiling, each dipping slightly toward the floor in the middle. I like the fish tacos and the Coney Island IPA on draft. It’s a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood in which I’ve been mostly anonymous. No one here knows my name.

  It’s five o’clock on a Monday in the second week of June. The city hasn’t heated up yet to that suffering sauna it becomes in full summer. The bar’s a quarter full, and even though it’s a bit dark in here, I can feel the sunlight on my back through the stained-glass windows. I should be outside, soaking it in. Instead, I’m inside, planning, plotting, anxious.

  “Job hunt?” Liam says, taking the stool next to me without asking, motioning to the notebook on the bar that I’ve been making notes in.

  My heart hitches. I flip my notebook over. “Something like that.”

  “You drinking the IPA?”

  “Yep.”

  “Any good?”

  “It’ll do.”

  He catches the bartender’s eye, points to my glass, and puts up two fingers. The bartender nods and takes two glasses down.

  “What’s up, kid?” Liam asks.

  “Shouldn’t you stop calling me that by now?”

  He gives me what I call his “charming” smile. Liam’s six feet tall, and at forty-two, he still looks like he’s in the merchant marines—his skin halfway between tanned and burned, with deep lines ingrained in his forehead. His dark-brown hair is peppered with gray, and his eyes are a hazel color that’s the opposite of mine, closer to brown than green. “Does it bother you?”

  “Sometimes. Plus, three people called me ma’am today, so I think I’m past the ‘kid’ stage.”

  He gives me a quick once-over. “It might’ve been the outfit.”

  “Shut it.”

  The bartender delivers our beers and Liam slips him a twenty. He’s the king of overtipping, which gets him goodwill and access, both of which are useful in his profession.

  “You rang?” Liam asks.

  “What took you so long to get here?”

  “I was on a case.”

  Liam works mostly as a private detective, with a side hustle as a fixer for certain prominent New York families and their lawyers. It’s a lucrative business, though Liam doesn’t care that much about money. He’s the one who rescued me from the Land of Todd. And then he spent a year helping me reintegrate into society. One way or another, he’s taught me most of the things I know.

  “Something I can help with?” I ask him.

  He laughs. “I’ve got it. Besides, you were never my best student.”

  “Can you blame me?”

  He puts his hand over mine briefly. “You know I don’t believe in blame.”

  A Liamism. There is no blame. Check, don’t trust. You are your own choices. I had a notebook full of them, back when I used to write down everything he said like it was something to replace the Toddisms I’d been brought up on.

  “I know.”

  “How was your trip?” Liam asks.

  “Quiet.”

  “Good.”

  “Thanks for meeting me.”

  “No problem. What’s up?”

  “Can’t I just be hankering for the pleasure of your company?”

  He pulls a face as he lifts his beer to his mouth. “I haven’t seen you in, what?”

  “Six months.” I knew to the day, but that might freak him out.

  “Six months. That’s too long.”

  “I’ve been . . . busy.”

  “So I read. How come you didn’t answer my texts or meet me when I asked?”

  That had been hard, ignoring Liam. I’ve been in love with him since I was eighteen, and I’m used to following his commands. “I needed to figure some stuff out on my own. Plus . . . well, I was ashamed, to be honest.”

  The bartender delivers the plate of fish tacos with a side of fries that I ordered right before Liam appeared. He reaches for one of the tacos. “Do you mind?”

  “Everything I have is yours,” I say.

  Liam winces at the Toddism. “Okay, now I know something’s wrong. Spill.”

  I grew up in the Land of Todd. That sounds so innocent, doesn’t it? Like the Land of Nod, what Crate & Barrel used to call their kids’ furniture line. And for my parents, it started that way. When they joined, it all seemed benign. I want to believe this, because thinking otherwise puts too much between my parents and me, and we’ve got enough baggage.

  They were brought up in strict Mormon families and married young. They became members of the Land of Todd in their early twenties and were joined there soon after by my father’s brother, Tom, and his wife, Tanya. My parents must’ve given the place glowing reviews for the fresh air and the clean life they were living. And Todd. I’m sure they sang Todd’s praises as well. His energy. His purity.

  His vision.

  The Land of Todd—or the LOT, as we called it—rested on a large plot of land in the Adirondack Mountains. I
t was made up of small cabins that each family unit built for themselves, the communal dining hall called the Gathering Place, and Todd’s house, a log cabin overlooking the lake. There wasn’t any fencing when they joined. I’ve seen the photographs from the early days, and in every one of them everyone is laughing.

  But they should’ve been paying more attention. Done some research. The Land of Nod is where God exiled Cain after he killed Abel. It’s a place of wanderers, where some said even God himself could not see. Does that sound like the right idea to build a future on?

  By the time the children came along—me; my cousin, Kiki; the others—things had started to shift. Todd didn’t like the loss of attention, the loyalty to someone other than him, so he assigned two of the single women to be caregivers/guards and separated us from our parents. From the time I was five, I lived and worked at the Upper Camp, a part of the property that wasn’t easily accessible and had none of the amenities (running water, electricity, plumbing) the houses I’d known till then did.

  We were drilled in odd skills up there: how to dig a ditch, how to meditate for hours. We were being trained for something—we even had little outfits that I learned later were Girl and Boy Scout uniforms picked up on the cheap—but what? A new kind of society? A revolution? Todd was talking about that near the end of my time there, but it was incoherent. We’d be placed in strategic positions, and we’d know what to do when the time came. We’d understand the signals. It was all garbage, but we absorbed it silently, as we’d been taught.

  Then, on a rare day when we’d been taken into town to get groceries at the farmers’ market, Liam approached me while I was picking out tomatoes. “You don’t know me,” he said under his breath after telling me to look straight ahead and not react. “My name is Liam.” But I knew exactly who he was. A few years before, an entire family had left in the middle of the night. After that, there was a name that was whispered late at night when our minders were asleep. Liam. Whenever someone left, it was because of him. Maybe that was true, or maybe they slipped away without help. It was hard to know what to believe.

  But there was Liam in the flesh, looking like one of the heroes on the covers of the cheesy romance novels the girls hid in the walls and passed around like the contraband they were.

  Telling me to keep looking ahead, to just listen. Offering a lifeline. A way out.

  I took it.

  When I’m done filling Liam in, I’ve eaten one of the fish tacos, and he’s eaten two. The bar has filled up around us, and the music’s been turned up a notch. Imagine Dragons is singing about being a believer. What do they know?

  We’ve finished our beers and ordered another round. Not that it’s a long story to tell, but Liam is big on getting all the details, especially about Jessica Two.

  “She’s done this before,” I say.

  “I was thinking the same,” Liam says. He’s got his own notebook out, the twin of mine. So many of my preferences are Liam based, I have trouble deciding if I do something because I like it or because he taught me to. “You thinking of trying to find her yourself?”

  “That’s why I called you. What do you think?”

  “I think you should.”

  “You do?”

  I was expecting a lecture. I’d broken one of his cardinal rules: never leave all your money in one place, especially not a place that’s easily accessible through electronic means.

  “Doesn’t look like the police are going to do anything,” he said.

  “I got that impression. Where should we start?”

  “I haven’t agreed to help you yet.”

  “But you will, right?”

  Liam holds his beer glass with his thumb and index finger and swings it back and forth. He loves giving silence for answers.

  “I was thinking that if she’s done it before, finding some of her other victims might help,” I say.

  “Other Jessica Williamses?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think she’s used that name before? Why?”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it? She has the ID; why not use it more than once if she can?”

  “Or she might have a string of IDs,” Liam says.

  “She might. But you and I both know that a good ID is harder to get than most people think.” After I’d left the LOT, I learned that my birth had never been registered. Todd didn’t believe in the government, only Todd. It had taken six months, and a lot of help from Liam, to get the Social Security card in my wallet and the birth certificate in my safe-deposit box, which is also where I socked away my emergency fund, safe from Jessica Two.

  “Plus,” I add, “she said this thing about how she played this game ‘every time she met another Jessica.’”

  “That might be a clue. Or it might be a lie.”

  “Let’s call it a hunch.”

  He finishes his beer. “You know what I think about hunches.”

  “Eliminate them. Don’t believe. Check.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So how do we check?”

  Liam turns his stool around and rests his back against the bar. He looks out at the crowd of suited men and women. He’s wearing dark jeans and a black shirt, a look he can easily turn into something resembling a suit with the addition of a blazer and a tie. A look for all occasions, he’s called it.

  I follow his gaze. There’s a pretty early-twenty-something accepting a drink from an older guy at one of the tables near the door.

  “She’s fine,” I say.

  “Probably.”

  “You don’t have to save everyone.”

  He looks at me. “If your ‘hunch’ is right, then there must be points of commonality.”

  “Besides our names?” I say cheekily.

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  “I feel like one.”

  “You got taken by a pro.”

  “You think?”

  “Definitely. What she did took a lot of planning. She must’ve been tracking you for a while, waiting for an opportunity to connect with you and play that game. And the phone tap at the end, that’s clever.”

  “That’s how she got my banking info, right? Some kind of capture software.”

  “Yes, but that’s pretty sophisticated. There’s encryption in place that should’ve prevented her from getting anything other than your contact information.”

  The girl is shaking her head at something the older man’s saying. But then she laughs, and the tension in my body eases. A downside of Liam: he makes you see bad everywhere you look. Which might be accurate most of the time, but it’s a hard way to live.

  “Don’t say it, okay. I know I shouldn’t have had my banking information in my phone, but I thought it was safer than e-banking over that shared Wi-Fi in my apartment. I know you always say—”

  “Do everything in person—”

  “Yes, but life’s not built like that anymore.”

  “Expedience over security. It’s always been our undoing.”

  A group of recently off-work friends stumble into the bar, laughing. The bartender ups the level on the sound system again and rings a bell: last call for happy hour. “Where the Streets Have No Name” starts playing. They could be describing the Land of Todd.

  “I was easy prey,” I say.

  “What’s done is done. What matters is what you do now.”

  “All right, enough with the sayings. Are you going to help me or what?”

  I keep expecting him to offer, but instead he’s made me ask again. Life is like that sometimes. Plans depend on other people.

  “I’m at your service, ma’am,” Liam says, then throws his head back and laughs.

  Chapter 5

  Card Tricks

  Liam walks me back to my apartment, a few blocks away from the bar. Jose, the three-card monte man, is set up on the corner of Greenwich and Seventh, the way he often is. He’s got a crowd of tourists around him, smiling and wasting their one-dollar bills like businessmen in a strip joint. Whatever floats your boat.r />
  Liam watches Jose’s hands, which I know from him is what you’re supposed to do rather than watch the cards. Jose is very good, but if you look carefully enough, you can see what Liam pointed out to me years ago: he flashes the red queen, then palms it so it’s one of the other cards that hits the table first. Thinking that you’re following the card the dealer shows you is the mistake everyone makes, the reason the monte always wins unless you guess right through blind luck.

  “You going to take him on?” I ask. Sometimes Liam likes to torture the three-card guys by beating them at their own game.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Instead of saving all of us, you should’ve trained us up like Fagin in Oliver Twist.”

  “Find the lady,” he says, tapping my sternum lightly. “Don’t think I didn’t consider it. With you and Daisy, we would’ve made a killing.”

  I watch his face. It’s hard to know if he’s joking sometimes, or what he’s thinking in general. He was pretty clear, though, when I made a pass at him on the night of my college graduation a few months before I turned twenty-three. He removed my hand from his thigh gently and told me to get some sleep. I hid out from him for most of the year after that, but it was hard to stay away from Liam forever.

  “What held you back?” I ask.

  “Is that a serious question?”

  I shrug.

  “None of you deserved to be used anymore.”

  The crowd lets out a loud Ahhh! Jose just took a guy for fifty dollars.

  “That guy’s a plant,” I say.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  Liam checks out the player. He’s in his midthirties and wearing a Mariners cap and jeans ten years out of date. He bets another fifty dollars and wins this time. The crowd’s bigger now, and pretty soon one of the local beat cops is going to break this up.

  “You might be right,” Liam says.

  “I totally am.”

  “Why the confidence?”

  “He was doing the same thing this morning.”

  Liam gives me one of his deep belly laughs. “That’s my girl.”

  I wish.

  It took me almost a year to call the number Liam slipped me among the produce. I should’ve left with him that day at the farmers’ market like he asked, but I didn’t want to leave my cousin, Kiki, behind. So instead, I’d taken his number and promised I’d find a way to use it when I was ready.