So I told the truth, or at least as much of it as I thought necessary. I wrote about Allie and Julie, and I included Julie’s picture. I wrote about the Donovans, and I also wrote about the guy following me, describing him and his car as best I could.
I didn’t mention anything about my apparently having been working on a major story that had been wiped from my mind, nor did I mention Dr. Garber and his comment that I had said the story was about Sean Lassiter. I still had to follow up on the Lassiter connection and see if it led me anywhere, but there were just so many hours in the day.
I really didn’t care that the majority of people who read the story would think I was descending further into a paranoid insanity. If sunlight was the best disinfectant, I was doing the best I could to flush out the germs.
The more I could bring everything out in the open, the better chance I had of finding out what the hell was going on.
Before I submitted it, I gave it to Allie to read over dinner. “It’s powerful,” she said, but didn’t say so with much enthusiasm.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t think you’ll scare them with this, Richard. You’re pulling your punches.”
“I’m drawing attention to what’s going on.”
She nodded. “Until some family pretends to send a kid up in a hot-air balloon, or another athlete or politician gets caught with his pants down. I think you should try to do more with this. I think you should try and scare the people we’re chasing.”
“Why?”
“So that maybe they’ll make a mistake,” she said.
“They might try to rectify that mistake by coming after us,” I pointed out.
She nodded again. “They might.”
“We don’t really have anything to scare them with. All I could do would be to put in the piece that we have leads I can’t talk about, but that are bringing us closer to the answer.”
“I think you should include that,” she said. “Make it sound like we’re hot on their tail, and that we’re about to go to law enforcement with what we know.”
“Good idea,” I said. “You know, I told Scott that he couldn’t edit the piece, and now you’re doing it.”
She smiled. “Somebody had to.”
The Stone made the presentation six times to eleven people.
At no time did he make it to more than two people at once. It was a game that had to be played; even though each of the people knew very well who they were competing with, there was no way they would ever get in the same room.
Stone was surprised that the repetitive process did not bore him. Such was the power of the presentation, and the recipients were so clearly impressed that he enjoyed it each and every time.
It was a multimedia show, starring Richard Kilmer, and broken into two parts, with an intermission so that questions could be asked. The dividing line was that day in Ardmore, with the post-car-crash material primarily a collection of the amazing video and audio surveillance that had followed Kilmer wherever he went.
The object was to show the great stress that Kilmer was under, and the fact that it was having no effect on the ultimate accomplishment. But the Stone didn’t hype anything; he just let the material speak for itself.
The Stone had long ago decided that using Kilmer was the smartest move he had ever made, and he had made a lot of smart moves. Kilmer had gone public, as the Stone had hoped he would, giving the project the kind of credibility that all the presentations in the world could never fully accomplish.
These people were smart enough to comprehend what they were looking at, and they had long ago understood how it could benefit them. Most of them weren’t the ultimate decision makers, but their recommendations would have great influence on those who were.
But the Stone was not looking to make the sale yet; it would not be in his best interest to do so. That would come when the demonstration was concluded, after Kilmer starred in the grand finale.
Then the final bidding would begin, and the winning bid would be more than ten billion dollars. The Stone had already decided on that minimum amount, and he knew he could get it. It was at least twenty times more than he figured he could get if he had acted legally. And then he would first have had to share that with his cocreators, before dealing with all the other vultures who would come looking to piggyback onto his success.
But the difference in money, while compelling, was not his only reason for going this route. He was determined that this country was not going to reap the benefits of his genius. The powers that be had long ago decided he was beneath them and was not to be respected or trusted. They would pay dearly for the way they treated him.
Based on the faces of the people watching his presentation, respect was there in abundance. They were in awe of his work, and prepared to pay a fortune to acquire it.
Which was fine with him.
“Did you see this?” Hank Miller walked into the room without knocking and laid the open magazine on the desk of his ex-brother-in-law, Lieutenant George Kentris of the Ellenville Police Department. Ellenville is a town about twenty minutes from Monticello. It’s similar in size, though slightly smaller.
Kentris looked up and frowned. “If I worked as hard as you, I’d have time to read magazines,” Kentris said.
“Then it’s lucky I stopped by. Read it.”
Kentris picked it up and scanned through Richard’s latest article, reading more carefully as he realized why Hank had brought it to him.
Kentris had been on station duty about eight months before when a man had been reported trying to enter a home in an upscale residential Ellenville neighborhood, and two officers had gone to get him. They brought him back to the station, which was how the guy became Lieutenant Kentris’s problem.
What made the situation unusual was that the guy, who seemed to be in his early forties, claimed to be the owner of the house he was trying to enter. And it wasn’t that he was breaking the door down or climbing through a window; he had knocked on the door because he said he had misplaced his key.
The man said his name was Daniel Richardson, but had no identification to prove or disprove it. He said he lived at that home with his wife, Cynthia, and their eight-year-old son, Andrew. He was employed as a science teacher at the local high school, and had been there for ten years.
Kentris had done some checking, and absolutely nothing the man said was true. He had never lived in the house, was not a teacher at the school, and there was absolutely no evidence that he or his family ever lived in Ellenville, or anywhere else, for that matter. Kentris let him call his wife, but the number he dialed was out of service, which he couldn’t explain and which seemed to both puzzle and worry him.
But the man sounded completely credible and earnest, and claimed to be confused by what was going on. There had to be some mistake, he proclaimed, because everything he was saying was true. What would he have to gain by lying?
He also didn’t seem like the typical vagrant. He was reasonably well dressed, clean and freshly shaven, and spoke clearly and articulately. He did not seem in any way impaired, no alcohol on his breath or needle marks on his arms, and passed a field sobriety test that Kentris administered, even though they were not in the field.
So he was either lying through his teeth or completely delusional.
It was late in the day, and Kentris would have to start the process of identifying the guy in the morning, but he wasn’t sure where to keep him that night. The jail was a possibility but somehow didn’t seem right. Kentris liked the guy, felt sorry for him, and wanted to help. And the guy hadn’t tried to break into the house; all he had done was knock on the door.
So Kentris had called Hank, who owned a motel out near the highway, and asked if he could put the guy up in a room.
“No problem,” Hank said. “As long as the department is paying.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t charge for the one night.”
“I was hoping the bank wouldn’t ask for my mortgage payment thi
s month. And I was hoping your sister would send back my alimony check,” he said. “Hope is for suckers.”
“Okay, you cheap son of a bitch. The department will pay,” Kentris said. “Can you lock his room from the outside?”
“Sure, but there’s an additional locking fee for that.”
“You’re an asshole, Hank. My sister was smart to dump you.”
“No argument there,” he said cheerfully.
Kentris dropped off the mysterious guy on the way home and stayed while Hank put him in a room. He’d pick the guy up in the morning on the way in, and either solve the mystery or turn him over to Social Services. Or maybe the guy would have a true story to tell by then.
“You stay here, and we’ll get started on finding out what’s going on in the morning,” Kentris said. “You all right with that?”
“Sure,” the guy said. “I’m really tired.”
Kentris left after Hank locked the door from the outside. “What if he gets hungry?” he asked.
Hank shrugged. “Hopefully he has some Tic Tacs with him. Room service is closed.”
“When did it close?”
“I think during the Carter administration.”
As it turned out, the man had no need to call room service, because he was dead within an hour of his entering the motel room. Kentris discovered him in bed the next morning. He had placed a .22-caliber gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. His fingerprints were on the gun, and gunpowder traces were on his hand. The coroner ruled it a suicide; it was not a difficult call for him to make.
Both the arresting officers and Kentris had previously determined that he was not armed, and the door to the motel room had remained locked from the outside. No one had reported hearing a gunshot. After an investigation by the state police, the officers and Kentris were all given reprimands for their lax handling of the matter.
It was and remained the most upsetting incident of Kentris’s career, and not because of the reprimand. A man had died on his watch, and it was a death that could have been prevented. Having said that, Kentris did not understand how the weapon could have been concealed.
Two weeks after the body was found, it was learned that Daniel Richardson was really Larry Collins, from Norman, Oklahoma. He was an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Oklahoma, and had disappeared from his home three weeks before. His family and the local police could not provide any reason why.
When Kentris finished reading Richard’s article, Hank asked, “Sound a little familiar?”
“Worth checking into, that’s for sure,” Kentris said. The article had referred to a previous article written on the same subject, and Kentris had vaguely heard about it. But he never really paid attention, because until now he never knew it had any connection to anything he was involved with. But the Donovans were murdered less than ten miles from Kentris’s office, so now the connection was there.
“So if this turns out to be anything, can you deputize me?” Hank asked. “Maybe give me a commendation, or the key to the city, or something?”
“Why don’t you go back to the motel?” Kentris asked, looking at his watch. “The after-lunch, one-hour-quickie crowd should be showing up around now.”
“Who do you work for, the KGB?” The question was asked by Mark Cook, who was in my house waiting for me when I got home from dinner with Allie. He had just spent the last three hours checking to see if my place was being bugged.
“What does that mean?”
“Somebody has heard every word you said in this house, and seen every move you’ve made. Somebody who knew exactly what he was doing, and had an unlimited supply of money to help him do it.”
“The place was bugged,” I said. It wasn’t a question, but a statement. I was trying to let my mind process the implications.
“About twenty-five years ago the U.S. government built a huge new embassy building in Moscow. While it was being built, the Russians put bugging devices everywhere, even in the foundation. The Americans discovered it and never moved in, but if they hadn’t, nothing they ever did or said would have been private.”
“So?”
“So, compared to this, that embassy was clean,” Cook said.
“Should we be talking about this outside?” I asked.
Cook shook his head. “Doesn’t matter; it’s all been disabled. Took a while.”
“So they know we know.”
Cook shrugged. “They knew the moment I started looking. They watched me do it. I even gave them the finger.”
I couldn’t even think of anything to say, so Cook went on. “This is serious stuff,” he said, “and you are dealing with serious people. Some of the devices were so state-of-the-art that I had to call some friends to check them out. Half of them are classified.”
He handed me what looked like a golf tee, only maybe a tenth the size. At the end of it was glass; it couldn’t have been more than an eighth of an inch wide. “What is it?” I asked.
“A video camera. Set to turn on by heat. Body temperature. There were eleven of them in your house. Each one cost about six grand.”
“And we have no idea who received the pictures that they were transmitting? Is there any way to determine that?”
He shook his head. “No way at all. And if there was, these people would be smart enough to send us on a wild-goose chase.”
All of this was completely stunning to me, but the shock was starting to give way to anger. Having said that, it was also mingled with some relief. I was not crazy. Some outside, diabolical force was behind Jen’s disappearance from the very beginning. I don’t know how they completely wiped all traces of her from my life, and all memories of her from everybody we knew, but I would figure it out.
No matter what it took, I would figure it out.
When Cook left, I called Craig Langel and told him what I had just learned. “Jesus Christ,” he said, whistling softly to emphasize his surprise. “You trust this guy to be telling you the straight scoop?”
“Totally. He had nothing to gain. He didn’t even charge me.”
“And you have no idea who’s doing this?” he asked.
I responded by telling Craig that I had reason to think the story I had mentioned to him was about Sean Lassiter, and asked him to investigate what Lassiter was currently doing, and who he was doing it to. “Maybe Lassiter is somehow involved in this,” I said.
“That wouldn’t surprise me,” he said. He had done some work on the original Lassiter story. “I’ll check it out.”
Allie operated on a higher emotional level than me; she felt the same things I felt, she just was more intense about it. So when I told her about the bugging of the house, she was even more outraged than I was, and at the same time so relieved that she seemed thrilled.
“This confirms everything,” she said. “The guy following you, the Donovans’ murder being connected to all this … everything. We have a real enemy to defeat now. There’s no question about it.”
Once again she didn’t seem to want to focus on the fact that the enemy had demonstrated a capacity for cold-blooded murder, probably because of what it would say about the chances for Jen to be alive. I didn’t bring it up because I wanted to push it as far back in my mind as I could.
“We need to get to Ardmore,” I said.
She nodded. “Tell me about it.” Every time she used that expression that Jen always used, I found it jarring.
“We’ll go tomorrow.”
“Have we decided what we’re going to do when we get there?”
“We’ll visit all of Donovan’s clients; I’ve got the list from Craig. We’ll talk to all the people we know he saw there.”
“And then?”
“Then we go see the people that I met while I was there. Including Jen’s mother.”
I could see Allie react to this, but she didn’t say anything. She was of the belief that Jen’s mother and hers were one and the same, and that the woman in question was in Wisconsin.
“I’
m sorry … you know what I mean,” I said.
She nodded. “Yes. I understand.”
“I think we have to turn over as many rocks as we can, try to stir things up as much as possible. Then see what happens.”
“Let’s do it,” she said.
The drive out to Ardmore was excruciating; I was literally going back to the scene of my worst nightmare. I had never imagined I would ever go near the place again, unless it was to bring Jen home. And that certainly was not going to happen, at least not this time.
Allie was sensitive enough to leave me alone with my thoughts, and we drove in relative silence for almost the entire trip. I’m sure she was grappling with her own emotions as well; this was possibly even tougher on her than on me. At least I knew I was searching for Jen; for all her confidence, Allie couldn’t be sure her sister had any connection to this other than an amazing resemblance.
When we passed the WELCOME TO ARDMORE sign, Allie put her hand on mine, which happened to be on the steering wheel at the time. “Good things happen starting now,” she said.
I smiled. “It’s definitely time.”
The first thing we came upon was the general store at the edge of town, where Jen and I had stopped the first time, and where I had stopped on the way out to question the clerk. I pulled into the parking lot, and Allie said, “You’ve been in here?”
“Yes. Twice.” Then I smiled. “Or more. Or never. Or this place is a figment of our imaginations.”
We went inside; it looked exactly like it had the previous time, and the same woman that I had spoken to was working the register. When I walked over to her, she looked up at me, and her face brightened.
“Well, look who’s here.” She opened the door leading to the back room and yelled, “Cassie, come on out here!”
Within seconds a teenage girl came out from the back, and did a double-take when she saw me. “I don’t believe it.”
“What are you two talking about?”
“You’re the guy that wrote the articles in that magazine, aren’t you? You stopped in here and asked about Janice Ryan.”
On Borrowed Time Page 9
