Pieces of the Past (Witness Security Book 1)

by Jamie Hill

  Peyton grabbed the other pillow and joined in the assault.

  Ethan, with his orange-tinted fingers, stood to the side, jumping up and down, clapping.

  Doug fended off the attack as best he could until he ended up flat on the floor, hands raised in surrender. “I give! I give!”

  Ethan wiggled his fingers in Doug’s face, but Christine shooed him away. “Go wash, now. Brush your teeth. Get ready for bed. I’ll be in to check on you in five minutes.”

  “Good night.” The boy grinned at Doug as he walked toward the hall.

  “Night, kiddo.”

  Christine gave Peyton a kiss on the cheek. “Good night, honey. I hope you can sleep.”

  Peyton nodded. “I’m pretty tired. Night, Mom. Night,” she said in Doug’s general direction.

  “Sleep tight.” He lay on the floor, gazing up at Christine.

  It was all she could do not to crawl down there next to him. “I guess we’ll see you in the morning.”

  He smiled. “Not even going to help me up?”

  She took a step backwards. “Nothing good could come of that. I suspect you’ll manage. I see you have a pillow and some covers. I’ll just say good night.” She turned away quickly.

  “Good night Christi,” he called after her.

  She paused, and smiled.

  * * * *

  Christine tossed and turned for what felt like hours. When she finally did close her eyes, she slept hard. The sun was shining brightly when she dragged herself out of bed the next morning. After a quick stop in the bathroom, she grabbed her robe and headed to the kitchen where she heard talking and smelled food.

  Doug was flipping pancakes and Ethan seemed to be gobbling them up the moment they hit his plate.

  “Morning.” Her son’s mouth was full.

  “Well hello there. That looks good.” She told herself she was speaking of the food, and not the handsome man preparing it. He was friendly and animated, not at all what she’d originally thought of him.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead.” Doug smiled at her. “It’s almost nine. Didn’t you need to call a couple people?”

  She held her head in one hand. “Well, crap. Yes I do. Is there coffee?”

  “Here you go.” He handed her a cup. “Strong and black. My phone is on the counter, help yourself.”

  “Thanks.” She accepted the drink gratefully and took his cell to the other room, where she called in to work and both schools. Everyone was understanding and apologetic about her mother’s death, which made her feel lousy for lying. Christine drew a deep breath and exhaled. She had no other choice.

  When she returned to the kitchen, Doug piled some pancakes on her plate. “Hungry?”

  “Yeah. I could eat.” She sat at the bar next to Ethan.

  “They’re really good.” Her son confirmed.

  Doug glanced at her. “Everything go okay?”

  She nodded. “No problems. Any news yet today?”

  “Nada. I told you, these things take time. Eat up.”

  She glanced at her son who continued to shovel pancakes in his mouth. “Ethan, don’t eat so fast. Slow down.” She picked up her fork and her gut churned. What was Ethan going to do after breakfast? What would they do all day? Time was going to drag.

  Doug refilled her coffee cup. “Should you wake Peyton for breakfast?”

  “Thanks.” She took a sip of the hot brew. “Nah, let’s let her sleep. I can always fix her something later.” She glanced around. “What does she have to wake up for, anyway? The longer she sleeps, the less time spent being bored. And complaining about it.”

  “True that. I vote for letting her sleep, too.”

  Christine smiled and finished her breakfast. A short debate with Ethan followed, video games versus math homework, in which video games won out after Doug offered to help with math after lunch.

  “I’m a whiz at math.” He smiled at Christine as Ethan ran off to play.

  “Is there anything you aren’t a whiz at?” She tried to keep a straight face.

  He rubbed his chin. “Can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but I’ll let you know. Now if you’ll excuse me, after I clean up here I have some calls to make.”

  “Go ahead.” She shooed him out. “You cooked, the least I can do is wash the dishes.”

  “Why, thank you, ma’am.” He grabbed his phone and headed to the other room.

  It was several hours later, when she was watching The Price is Right and flipping through a magazine, that she heard Doug’s phone ring. He’d been on and off it all morning, but he’d been the one placing most of the calls. This last conversation was brief.

  He entered the living room with a grim expression on his face. “Peyton?”

  Christine sat up and muted the TV. “She’s in her room. What’s wrong?”

  He hurried down the hall and stopped in front of the closed bedroom door. “Peyton, come out please,” he said loudly.

  “Can it wait? I’m at a good part in my book.”

  “No. Now, please.” His voice was firm. He returned to the front room. His face was red, and his eyes looked as if they could shoot darts.

  “Doug, what is it?” Christine’s heart thumped wildly. She’d never seen him this way before.

  Peyton and Ethan both appeared in the doorway. “What’s wrong?” her son asked.

  Doug turned to face Peyton. “Facebook? Really?”

  “What?” Peyton blinked.

  Christine recognized the look. An attempt at innocence, without much conviction to back it up. She jumped from her chair. “Peyton closed her Facebook page. I helped her do it.”

  “Maybe so. But how do you explain this?” He held up his cell phone, loaded to a page on the Facebook app.

  She stepped forward to see it.

  Peyton’s Place.

  Whoever created the page had used those words as the member’s first and last name. “That’s not her,” Christine murmured, but her heart sank. Christine’s mother had been a fan of the soap opera by the same name which aired back in the sixties. The woman still talked about it fondly. That was where she and Larry had gotten the idea to name their daughter Peyton.

  Doug pointed to the profile picture of a cartoon cat. “Well that’s not her. But check out these pictures.” He scrolled to the photo section and images of her daughter filled the screen.

  Christine grabbed the phone and began scanning the shots. “These are from Chicago—but this one was taken here. And this one. Oh, Peyton!” She gazed at her daughter with disappointment.

  “So what?” Peyton stomped around the room waving her arms. “It’s no big deal. I listed my address as Chicago. No one can track me here.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Doug fumed. “You don’t think a hacker could trace your IP address? They do it all the time.”

  Peyton paused. “What’s an IP address?”

  Doug took a breath then let it out before speaking. “Every device connected to the internet is given a unique number, it’s called internet protocol, or IP address. It’s based on where you’re at now, not where you claim to be.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Ethan waved his hands in front of her. “Are you nuts? Everyone knows that!”

  “E, please.” Christine grabbed him and held him by her side. “Peyton, how long have you had this account?” She pushed the button marked friends and studied the eighty-two names on the list.

  “A few months. I had to do it. Everyone has Facebook. No one understood why I didn’t.”

  Doug shook his head. “Don’t use that excuse. We handle Facebook issues all the time. There are dozens of reasons to give why you don’t have a page. Facebook is lame. My mom won’t let me. No one uses Facebook anymore. Instant messaging is so much cooler.” He faced Peyton. “Jordan would have helped you with this if you’d asked her or your mom. We could have showed you how to set up a page that was safe, and specific to your life in Topeka. But you didn’t want that, did you?”

  “Ma
ybe I didn’t. Maybe I just like connecting with people on Facebook.”

  “Oh no.” Christine stared at the screen. She glanced up and looked from Peyton’s face to Doug’s, then handed the phone to him.

  He stared at the friend’s profile she had stopped at. “Who’s Lillian White?”

  Christine’s heart sank. “My mother.”

  Chapter Five

  Metropolitan Correctional Center

  Special Housing Unit

  Chicago, Illinois

  “Hey boss. Something’s up.”

  His fingers tightened around the small cell phone until they turned white. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I’m not a mind reader.”

  “They’re gone. The family is gone.”

  “Gone?” Rage flared inside his gut. “Where could they go? I thought you were watching them!”

  “I was! But the cops musta got wind of something. They started hanging around, staking out the house. I had to pull back so they didn’t spot my car.”

  “And you lost track of the family.”

  “All of a sudden, they’re gone. No activity whatsoever coming and going from the house.”

  “Is she still going to work? Are the kids at school?”

  Hesitation. “I’m—not sure.”

  Irritation bubbled inside him. “You are so fucking lucky you’re five hundred miles away from me. I’ve killed people for smaller screw-ups than this, you incompetent turd.” Strong talk from a man locked up in solitary confinement.

  “I’m sorry boss! I’ll start digging now. I should be able to find something.”

  “Do it by tomorrow when you call, or you’re going to regret this lapse in judgment. Yours is not the only phone number I have memorized.”

  “Understood. I, uh, think maybe those flowers…” His sentence trailed off.

  “I don’t pay you to think. Fix this mess. Now.” He disconnected the call and returned the phone to its hiding place.

  He wasn’t sorry he’d sent the flowers. Everyone in the office knew about the annual ritual. He’d wanted to shake the bitch up, and apparently it’d worked. She and the brats were living a normal life like nothing had happened, when in reality, that wasn’t the case. Everything is different now.

  Besides, nobody told him what to do. Nobody ever had. That’s the way he liked it.

  Maybe if you listened to somebody once in a while, you wouldn’t be locked up in here.

  He slapped the side of his head to silence the inner voice. “I’m the boss,” he said to the walls. “I’ll always be in charge.” No prison can stop me. “When I say jump, people ask ‘how high?’ That’s the way it’s always going to be.”

  He sat on his cot and watched a cockroach scramble across the cell floor.

  * * * *

  Topeka, Kansas

  Doug looked at Christine incredulously. “Your mother is Facebook friends with Peyton? What the devil was she thinking?”

  “She wasn’t thinking. Oh my gosh, I knew my folks were devastated when we had to leave, but I thought they understood. Any contact would endanger all of us.” She gazed at Peyton. “Mom never had a Facebook account. Did you put her up to this?”

  “She wanted to do it. She and Grandpa message me a couple times a week. They never post anything on my wall, though.”

  “Like that matters.” Doug paced the floor, his mind racing, figuring out damage control.

  “Dad was in on it too?” Christine glanced down at Ethan. “Did you know about this?”

  “Heck no!” His eyes were wide.

  Doug believed him, and he could tell she did, as well.

  Christine kissed the top of his head. “Why don’t you go back to your room now? We need to talk to your sister.”

  “Okay.” His voice was grudging but he did as asked.

  She folded her arms across her chest and looked at Peyton. “Have a seat.”

  “Mom—” the girl protested, but reconsidered when Christine made a quick move toward her. Peyton dropped to the edge of the sofa.

  Doug bit back a smile. Christine would no more strike one of her children than he would talk back to his own mother. A person couldn’t tell that by looking at her now. She was steamed.

  “Peyton Isabella. Do you have any idea the danger you’ve put us in?”

  The girl shook her head. “I don’t see what the big deal is. We’re already in trouble. Why else would we be camped out in this dive?”

  He’d wanted to let her mother take the lead, but Doug couldn’t hold back any longer. “Dive? Well aren’t you a snooty little thing? This is a clean, decent house the service has placed you in. Believe me, I’ve seen some dives in my day. This is not one of them.”

  Christine rolled her eyes. “He’s right, but that’s really not the point. Don’t you understand why we’re here to begin with? Someone threatened to kill us.”

  Doug added, “And now your location’s been compromised. We can’t say for sure it was because of your Facebook page, but that little detail certainly didn’t help matters.”

  Peyton frowned. “That’s right, you don’t know, so don’t blame this mess on me. I didn’t want to move here to begin with.” She looked at her mother. “If you’d have let me stay in Chicago with Grandma and Grandpa—”

  Doug stepped in. “Then maybe right now your mom would be identifying your body in the Cook County Morgue. Or better yet, hatching a plan with hostage negotiators because some thug working for Martin Newsome or Sal Russo plucked you right out of school one day. What do you think? Does that sound like more fun than staying in this ‘dive’ for a few days?”

  Peyton looked away. A single tear ran down her cheek.

  Christine dropped to her knees in front of her daughter. “Sweetheart, listen to me. Nobody is happy about what’s going on here. I’d give anything to be back in our old house, where my biggest worry was what to fix for dinner.”

  The girl’s eyes flashed. “You don’t even miss Daddy anymore. You never talk about him.”

  “Because we can’t. We’re not supposed to. You were at the Witsec briefing. You heard the rules, same as I did. Why don’t you see how important they are?”

  Her tears fell harder now. “Witsec can tell us what to do, but they can never tell us what to feel. I miss my father, and I think about him every day. He was your husband. How can you let him go so easily?”

  “Easily? What about any of this has been easy?”

  “You don’t care! About Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa, any of them!”

  Christine took Peyton’s chin in her hand. “You’re wrong, my darling daughter. Every day I wish I could talk to my parents. I miss picking up the phone and calling them for advice, or just to talk.” She paused to regain her composure. “Of course I care. I miss them very much.”

  She released her hold on the girl. “Your father, well, that’s a little more complicated. We were having problems before any of what he did was exposed. You knew that. We tried not to talk about it in front of you and Ethan, but I know you were aware.”

  “It was never the same after Rusty,” Peyton said sadly. “You blamed Daddy.”

  Christine inhaled, as if caught off guard. “No, it wasn’t. You’re right about that.”

  Doug watched their faces intently. Who was Rusty? He hadn’t heard the name before.

  She went on, “But you’re wrong about my blaming Daddy. Rusty was sick, and he died. I turned to your father for comfort, while he turned to his work. There was no blame. There just wasn’t anything else, either. We could never pull it together after that.”

  Doug was itching to ask about Rusty, but knew this wasn’t the time. He’d be alone with Christine later and she could tell him then. For now, he listened and soaked it all in.

  Peyton’s tears started again. “Do you think that’s why Daddy did what he did? Took that money? Because he was sad about Rusty?”

  Christine shrugged. “I don’t know, sweetheart. He never told me. All he said was that he was trying to provide for us, wh
ich wasn’t really true. His regular job provided for us quite nicely. We didn’t need that extra money. He lost sight of that, somewhere along the way. Maybe it was Rusty’s death. But I refuse to blame his lapse in judgment on that. Daddy knew what he was doing. I never believed for a minute that he didn’t.”

  Peyton wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “And now Daddy’s sitting in prison, all by himself. No one to call him, or even write him a letter. How awful must that be?”

  “Very awful.” Christine rose and straightened the hem of her shirt. “But I don’t have the energy to feel sorry for him. I’m doing all I can to keep this family together. I thought you were with me.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

  Doug muttered, “No truer words.”

  Peyton scowled at him. “Can I go now?”

  He shrugged. “The damage has been done. I doubt you can get into any more trouble. But while you’re in that room, think about this. Once things settle down, your family will be relocated again, to someplace far away from Topeka and Chicago. Maybe Tucson, Arizona. It’s hot there, but I hear it’s a nice, dry heat.”

  “You’re a stupid ass!” Peyton spouted at him and turning on her heel, ran to her room.

  “I’m smart enough to stay off Facebook!” he called after her.

  Her door slammed.

  Christine sighed. “It really is like having two teenagers, with you around.”

  He dropped into one of the easy chairs. “So did you have two teenagers? Who is this Rusty I’m just now hearing about?”

  She sat in the other chair. “Rusty was our middle child. Three years younger than Peyton. About five years ago he was diagnosed with ALL, acute lymphocytic leukemia. The doctors said it was treatable. He was going through chemo and seemed to be holding his own.”

  Doug waited. When she didn’t continue he prompted, “But…”

  She looked at the floor. “He developed an infection and died less than a year after his diagnosis. He was ten years old. He’d be fourteen today.”