That frustration and something else struck when he thought about that red hair. It struck in his gut with a heat that surprised him until he remembered that it was Zoe’s hair. His grandmother brought in photos from years past and staring at one of him with Zoe in probably the only dress he could remember her ever wearing, it started to make sense. He’d worshiped her as a young boy and had fondly remembered her as his first love. It made sense, seeing her again as a blossoming grown woman, that those feelings would not only return but, would adopt a carnal edge.
The accident. She was there. Wasn’t she? He remembered the flaming hair. Or was it the car that had been on fire? The moment of impact eluded him. Sometimes it was a faint tap, startling but not serious in anything except the emotional shock of seeing her. Other times he could feel the numbing in his legs where twisted metal and upholstery crushed his legs, the searing pain through his side where he was thrown against his seatbelt with enough force to crack his ribs, and the throbbing behind his left ear. There was less of an emotional shock with the later and more of a deep ache, painful as the echoes of his physical injuries. If he thought about it too hard, the throbbing ceased to be a memory and spread becoming a pounding in his skull that caused his teeth to rattle. After the headache faded, the blind yearning in his chest remained.
It didn’t take long for him to understand that whatever form his relationship with Zoe had been, he loved her. But she couldn’t possibly have loved him in return or she would be there… right? His grandmother and brother were there but last he heard, Zoe had left the country. Maybe she would come to visit him again when she returned. He told himself it was irrational, but the notion took root in him that seeing her again would unlock something within, that the answers to the major questions he had about the last several months would suddenly become available if he could just talk to her for a few minutes.
He could probably ask Jack or his grandmother; if they didn’t know the answers to his questions they could probably point him in the right direction. Still, something held him back from asking them about Zoe. If there had been anything happening with Zoe, would either of the others know about it? And maybe he didn’t want to know the answer. Maybe he’d been with her for a month or two and had screwed things up. It would be better to wait and see what – if anything – he remembered.
****
Zoe stared out across the city of Paris and took several deep breaths. The air wasn’t particularly refreshing. She smelled the sharpness of damp metal and the sweat of the thousands of tourists that had stood on the platform before her, that pressed in around her now. It was lightly raining and the clouds obscured the sun, but the view was undeniably impressive. She pulled out her camera and began indiscriminately snapping photos. She would look at them more carefully when she got them on her computer; appreciate the details of what she could only vaguely make out with the naked eye.
As a child she’d always been convinced that she would miss something of her vacation if she didn’t take pictures of everything. Her father had laughed but her mother had scolded her and encouraged her to stop looking at everything through the lens of her camera and to try using her eyes for a change. Zoe had adopted a compromise of sorts in which she would snap photos for the first several minutes at any major tourist spot before putting the camera away for good. Occasionally an irresistible angle presented itself and she broke the rule, but for the most part she forced herself to make a mental catalogue of the smells, the sounds, and way a place made her feel. Then when she went through the pictures later, they were less like search-and-find images and instead truly brought her back to the moment, to being there.
She put her camera away and let her eyes wander to the couples and families around her. It was all too easy to distinguish which pairs were there on their honeymoons and which families were trying to use the excuse that it was educational for their children as a reason to splurge on the vacation. She could hear a father reading from a pamphlet about the Exposition Universelle and how the Eiffel Tower was built. There was a group of architecture students muttering about the construction and marveling at how it had been managed in 1889.
But Zoe spotted a small plane on the horizon and her palms began to sweat. She clung to the railing and willed the plane to continue on its path unabated. The noises behind her waxed and waned as the elevators brought tour groups up and down, removed one noisy batch only to replace them with another. Finally the plane had passed safely from her sight and she was able to breathe easy. Looking down to the cars driving along by the Seine she felt lightheaded. She wasn’t exactly afraid of heights, but she’d been up there long enough. She wanted to feel the solid ground beneath her feet again. Still, the idea of stepping into one of the elevators and dropping to the ground made her queasy.
She’d take the stairs. They were largely deserted. Only a few tourists, usually health nuts who missed going to the gym while they were on vacation, dared to make the climb. Going down was a bit easier but many who braved the ascent were more than willing to forego the complimentary workout of the descent. There were supposed to be 704 steps. As her heart ached for her father and her hands shook, Zoe began to count.
It was calming and served as a distraction until she reached 253. She bumped someone in passing and looking up to apologize spotted a familiar profile on the steps above. She froze as the woman she bumped moved on, her eyes fixed on a man wearing a baseball cap and windbreaker. Her heart rate jumped and her knees shook. It was him – Allan Peters. She fumbled for the cell phone in her pocket as a new wave of descending tourists urging her forward.
Agent Boon. She needed to call him and let him know Peters was here. She hesitated, the list of contacts open on the screen. Was there anything he or the FBI would be able to do about Peters if she did call? Did the FBI have any kind of jurisdiction? Probably not. They might be able to coordinate with Paris police or whatever the French equivalent of the FBI was, but Peters would be long gone by then. What else could she do then? She couldn’t just let him get away. But he was dangerous.
A part of her wanted to go up and confront him. It was Uncle David, after all. She’d grown up around him and knew better than to be afraid of him. Her hands were still damp from gripping the railing and watching the plane. Uncle David wasn’t the man he’d pretended to be. Allan Peters had lied, stolen, and killed. He’d killed her father. Zoe let herself get carried along with the small crowd pressing to go down the stairs. Soon her legs began to work of their own accord.
At the landing, she looked back up and saw the man turn. It wasn’t Uncle David – Allan Peters – whatever his name was. But the resemblance was enough to make her skin crawl.
She lamented her decision to take the stairs. Her calves were beginning to ache; the queasy feeling in her stomach was getting stronger as she kept moving while looking down and glimpsing the ground looming and tilting below. When she had finally reached the first floor and burst out onto the pavement, Zoe’s shirt was soaked with a cold sweat and she could feel blisters ready to burst on her heels. She hobbled away, ignorant of whether she was headed in the direction of her hotel.
An attendant followed her outside and reached for her tentatively, expressing concern in French she only half-understood. Zoe did her best to assure the middle-aged man that she was fine, reaching out to summon a taxi. When he saw what she was about, he assisted and held the door while she got in giving instructions to the driver.
Zoe’s breathing eased as she leaned into the questionable upholstery. It wasn’t him. But he hadn’t been caught yet and it was more than likely that he had made it out of the country by now. He could be anywhere. It hadn’t been him today, but it might have been. She would need to have a plan in case she ever did come across him. It would be my luck, she thought to herself with half amusement, half fear. The police, FBI, and goodness knows who else is looking for him, and I’d would run into him while traveling the world with no set itinerary and no means to detain him.
Relief washed through her followed by exhaustion. She had originally been planning on staying in the city for a full week. It was only day three. She still hadn’t been to the Louvre or to Notre Dame but she decided she would leave in the morning. It hadn’t been him but she wouldn’t be able to walk down the streets of Paris without looking over her shoulder to double check. Maybe she’d return on her way back to the States… whenever that might be.
So where to next? Berlin? Or should she go further, out of Europe to Asia? Australia? She wondered about those childhood images of digging a hole directly through the center of the Earth and popping out in China. If she were to draw a line directly through the Earth’s core from her home in Cupertino, where would it come out? Probably the middle of an ocean. Maybe she’d have better luck deciding if she closed her eyes and opened an atlas.
Walking through the lobby, she approached the front desk to inform them that she would be checking out in the morning. The look of disappointment on the concierge’s face was remarkably genuine as he asked if there was anything unsatisfactory with her stay.
“Something’s come up,” she said with a polite smile. “But I plan on returning at some point and I promise, I will stay here again when I do.”
****
“Who is she?” Agent Boon asked as he stared at the young woman sitting in the interrogation room, checking herself out in the one-way mirror.
“Her name is Elise Keats,” the young investigator said checking his notes. “We haven’t been able to get much out of her. No idea how she knows Peters but it’s definitely her on the security tape from the airport and the materials found in the dumpster from Oregon have her prints and Peters’ all over them.”
“She doesn’t know where he is,” Agent Boon said with confidence.
“How… how can you be sure, sir? She was with him all the way from—”
“For one thing, it’s not Peters’ style. She looks pretty confident which tells me she has a bargaining chip – or at least she thinks she does. But he wouldn’t be stupid enough to actually tell her anything useful. He plays everyone – might be that he can’t help himself. Still,” Agent Boon said, raising his cup of bitter, lukewarm coffee. “We at least know that he made it this far. Likely to cross the border into Canada and then he’ll loosen up a bit. Knows how hard it will be for us to coordinate something with Canadian authorities on short notice and he’ll be able to get somewhere without extradition easier. Whatever he did tell her, if she gives it up we can at least eliminate one of the possibilities from the list.”
“So why don’t you seem too worried?” the younger man asked with a smile.
“I’ve been working with the Canadian authorities on this one for a while now. As soon as we tracked him to Cupertino, I alerted my contacts that it was time to put the lockdown in place.” Agent Boon sipped his bad coffee without acknowledging his disgust. “Even if he makes it into the country, he won’t be getting out easily.”
“He managed to get out of here,” the investigator countered.
Agent Boon shrugged. “He won’t be expecting this. He won’t have the materials he needs to pull off another disguise like the one he used with this girl. Not on hand anyway. That means, no airports right now. Nothing with checkpoints. Not until he can get his hands on what he needs to create another complex disguise. And he’s an artist. He takes pride in creating these… masques. It’ll buy us some time to find the next breadcrumb he overlooked.”
The young investigator wasn’t convinced but was impressed nonetheless. It wasn’t his case to worry about. They had the footage of the girl aiding and abetting a fugitive. Whether she gave them anything else useful to the case against Peters was Agent Boon’s concern, not his. He would be assigned to another case, probably before Elise had been properly booked and given her phone call.
Chapter 24
Lucas sat in the car looking down at the photo in his hands. It was a picture of a beach house somewhere in South America, probably Brazil. A sign on a post at the edge of the frame was not in English. He’d taken it to the local community college to see if someone in the language department could translate it or at least tell him what language it was and found out it was Portuguese. Brazil seemed like it would be more his father’s taste than Portugal, though it could be some other Portuguese island.
He’d found the framed photo in a box of things that had been retrieved from his dad’s office at Dunmore Corp. The FBI had gone through everything in the office that could help with their investigation or prosecution and the rest – mostly personal items such as photos, unused office supplies, and knick-knacks – had been tossed into a cardboard box and handed over to Lucas.
It was several days before Lucas got around to going through the things in the box. He’d pulled out several photos of him and David over the years – a photo of the two of them with Barbara at David and Barbara’s wedding, Lucas and his father at Lucas’s high school graduation, at his college graduation. There was a chipped paperweight with a sea shell suspended in glass; a small bag with sand, stones, and a little rake that had comprised a Zen rock garden; a cherry wood fountain pen that had been given to David after ten years with the company.
As he lifted the objects out of the box, Lucas grew angrier and angrier. He hated that he was cleaning up his father’s mess. He wondered if his old man even had a picture of his son with him while he was on the run. Would he get a mysterious call in the middle of the night sometime from one of the few payphones that still existed to wish him a happy birthday? Not likely. In order to survive, David – or rather, David – would have to cut all ties to his former life. They’d be watching for him to contact Lucas for a while yet.
The frame had been in his hands when a wave of rage trembled through Lucas’s limbs. First his mother had taken off and left him with that man and now David – David – was gone without so much as a goodbye. Even Zoe had fled the scene. She didn’t even bother to tell him she was leaving; he had to find out when he went to see her at the house and that friend of hers, Mason, had answered the door. Europe, he’d said. At least, that was where she would start. But she had no set plan for where to go and no timeframe for when she would be back.
He lifted the heavy glass frame with the picture of him in his cap and gown with his father’s proud hand on his shoulder and the diploma held up in front of them triumphantly. It was one of the few images where the pride was tangible. Lucas hadn’t disappointed him… yet. He brought the frame down on the corner of the granite countertop.
Pain sliced through his palm as a shard of the shattered decoration embedded itself there. Blood flecked the picture as it floated to the floor. Lucas turned to the sink and rinsed the cut, pulling out two dishtowels and laying them side-by-side on the counter. He placed the pieces of the frame onto one and worked the shard of glass from his hand to add to the pile. Rinsing the cut in the sink, he wrapped the wounded hand in the second towel and started cleaning up the rest of the broken glass from the counter and floor, taking care not to step on any shards or cut his fingers in the process.
Bending, he lifted the bloody photo from the floor. Something fell to the ground and his first impression was that he had ripped the image. It was a second photo that had been concealed behind the first, the photo of the beach house. After wiping the blood from the graduation picture and setting it aside, Lucas tilted the beach house picture to see it better in the light.
The way the light passed through the photo showed there was something written on the back. Turning it over, Lucas found the name ‘Bob’ and a phone number with an unfamiliar area code.
On a hunch, he’d dialed it and learned that Bob was a real estate agent who dealt in foreign properties for American buyers. He hadn’t heard from David recently, but recalled hearing about his son Lucas on the occasions they’d met with each other. Lucas made sure to avoid bringing up his father’s being a wanted man and with a bit of lying – Lucas told the man his father had died and he was working
on taking care of dissolving the estate – Bob invited Lucas to come see him so they could go over the details of David’ various properties and Lucas’s legal options for selling and renting them.
Bob would be expecting a death certificate but the closest thing Lucas had was the photo. He didn’t think it would be much of a problem though; he’d brought an impressive knife that should be enough to convince Bob to give him the details of his father’s various properties. It occurred to Lucas that he should call the police or that FBI agent to tell him about the picture and his father’s multiple international properties. But Lucas wanted to find the man himself. There were some things he wanted to say to his father before letting the feds have their turn.
He finally got up the nerve to get out of the car and head into the realtor’s office. It was lunchtime and most members of the small office’s staff were out. A graying head popped out from behind a door followed by a large body as the man who was clearly expecting him emerged.
“Young Mr. Warner?” a gritty voice asked as he waddled to meet Lucas. “You do look a bit like your father. I’m Bob. Bob Howard. I’m sorry to hear about your father’s passing. Heart attack, you said?”
“Massive. Went quick which I guess was a blessing of sorts,” Lucas said taking the realtor’s hand for a brief shake.
“Agreed. I’m one of those who thinks it’s better not to know it’s coming. Don’t get yourself too psyched out about things you can’t control,” Bob said with a nod.
“Leaves a mess for those left behind to sort through though,” Lucas quipped.
“I’d expect it does. You been in contact with your dad’s lawyer about these properties?” He led Lucas towards the mid-sized office.
“Not about these ones, no. Only found out about them the other day when I called you. Dad didn’t tell me a whole lot but then, I didn’t really ask about much either,” Lucas said with a shrug. “I’m just finding out how much there was I didn’t know about him.”
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