While Liam figured the police would put out an APB for his car, he wanted to put some distance between himself and the scene before dumping it.
The city was dirtier and uglier on the west side of Chicago than it was along the river. Liam pulled into a cracked parking lot that was shared by CVS and Petco. The frigid air had blown discarded shopping bags, candy wrappers, paper cups, napkins, and other trash up against the fence surrounding it. A sign at the entrance said spots were reserved for shoppers only. “ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED,” it announced in big red letters.
That was going to include Liam’s Tesla sooner or later. It had been thirty-eight minutes since he’d left his office. As much as he didn’t want to leave his car there, he couldn’t risk holding onto it any longer.
Liam withdrew a few hundred dollars out of the ATM. His phone chirped an alert. He pulled it out of his pocket to take a look. He had a voicemail from David and a text message from a number he didn’t know. Liam didn’t have to listen to the voicemail to know it had something to do with Bash showing up at ConnectPlus.
The text message read: U need to disappear. Call me. I can help.
Liam looked at it for several seconds, trying to figure out who might have sent it, when his phone rang. The number calling him was the same one from which the text had come. This wasn’t right. He needed to disappear, but who would be calling him offering help? It smelled wrong. Liam turned off his phone and put it in his glovebox. He wasn’t sure the police could trace the phone’s location if it was off, but holding onto it seemed like too big of a risk.
He went into the CVS and asked where he could find a hotel. The cashier told him there was a Comfort Inn six blocks away.
But the Comfort Inn wanted an ID and a credit card on file. Since Liam planned to check in under an assumed name, he walked to two more hotels—both names he didn’t know. While one called Holiday Home didn’t care to keep a credit card on file, they both wanted IDs. Going with the lesser of two evils, he checked into Holiday Home. At least it mitigated his risk. The clerk gave him the key to a room on the second floor and told him the elevator was out.
The room overlooked an alley where a homeless man slept, bundled up in blankets and leaning against the side of a dumpster. There was peeling paisley wallpaper along the edge of the ceiling and an unidentifiable stain on the carpet Liam made sure to step around.
He sat down on the corner of the bed, reluctant to touch even that much of it. The room was unusually hot. He undid the top button on his shirt and rolled up his sleeves. For the first time since he’d decided to run, Liam had a chance to think. If he was going to find Elise’s killer, he’d have to start with what he knew, and what he knew was this: Elise had run away from home. Before that, she’d been hanging with a bad crowd. Something had happened that caused her to change her name. Patricia Harrison was probably right—Elise had probably done it to leave her past behind. So far, everything tracked.
What about the text messages though? Why were those deleted? And why did she lie about her job and where she grew up?
Liam still couldn’t answer those questions, so he decided not to dwell on them. He had to focus on the pieces that made sense for now.
He thought some more about why Elise had changed her last name. Since she hadn’t done it legally, she wasn’t hiding from the possession or prostitution charges. Those would show up on any criminal background check. That meant she wasn’t necessarily hiding something about her past but hiding from something in it.
Perhaps someone.
He needed to talk to Elise’s sister. He had to find out more about the crowd she was hanging out with before she ran away from home. If he could trace her life from then forward, he believed he could find her killer.
But first he needed a new ID, not to mention a new look and name to go with it. He had no idea where this investigation would take him. If he ever had to get into a building like his, he wasn’t going to get past the security desk simply on his charm. These days, he couldn’t even rent a room in a sketchy hotel on only his charm. And since the odds were good he’d make front page news for a while, he couldn’t keep flashing his real ID around town.
Liam didn’t know anything about fake IDs or where to get one. People who could get him something like that didn’t advertise. Well, not anywhere Liam had ever seen.
He thought about the text—U need to disappear—and the call that had come in seconds before he turned off his phone. Both unnerved him, but that message sounded a lot like somebody who could help him get what he was after. Perhaps they wouldn’t seem so strange if he knew who was trying to reach him. He should have answered the call.
Maybe . . .
He double-timed his way down the stairs without finishing the thought.
“What’s the rush?” the guy at the front desk said as Liam ran toward the double doors at the front of the hotel. It had been an hour since he left his car in the lot, and a truck from XF Towing was already there. The driver had hooked up Liam’s Tesla and was sitting in the cab, working the controls that would pull it onto the bed.
Liam banged on his door. “Hey! Hold on!”
Startled, the driver jerked his head up. There was a screech and a hiss and Liam’s car stopped moving. The driver rolled down the window. His thick, unkempt beard hid the collar of his plaid shirt. “I gotta do it, buddy.” He held out a business card. “You can come get it later today.”
“Yeah, I know.” Liam took the card. “I have to get something, okay?”
The driver shook his head. “I don’t know. Not supposed to do that. How do I know it’s your car?”
Liam pulled his keys out of his pocket. He held them up so the driver could see him press the lock button on the fob. The Tesla beeped and its lights flashed.
The driver mulled it over. He nodded toward the back of the truck. “All right, go ahead.”
“Thanks.” Liam scrambled over to the Tesla and grabbed his phone out of the glovebox. “That’s it. I’m done. She’s all yours.”
Without a word, the driver rolled back up his window and started the crank.
Liam found the text and moved to the other end of the parking lot for some privacy.
Liam Parker
“Hello, Liam,” a voice said.
Liam recognized that voice immediately. It was the dealer from Ava’s. “Jacob?” He had so many questions that they tumbled over each other, cutting each down to a word or two, until he landed on, “How did you get my number?” His phone number was unlisted.
“That’s not the question you need to be asking.”
A cold breeze cut through the lot and Liam turned his back to it. “How did you know—”
“About the arrest?” Jacob said. “It doesn’t matter. Now, listen to me. I can help you disappear, but you don’t have a lot of time. Sooner or later, the police are going to find you. There’s a bar downtown called Backstage. Meet me there at nine o’clock.”
“You can get me a fake ID?”
“Bring a thousand dollars in cash and I’ll take care of you.”
It sounded like a lot for what Liam wanted, but he wasn’t in a position to haggle over the price. He glanced around the trash-strewn parking lot in front of the CVS, saw the brake lights on the back of the tow truck flash as the vehicle started to move. “Okay.” Jacob hung up, and Liam glanced down at his cell, staring at it as if it were a foreign object.
The whole thing felt surreal, and he asked himself the same question he’d asked Jacob: How did he know about the arrest? Then he asked himself another: Why is he offering to help? He knew he wasn’t going to get an answer to either question—not at the bar, not even if he called Jacob back and demanded one. Besides, what would it change if he did? He still needed that ID and Jacob was the only person he knew who could get it for him. Maybe, when this was all over, Jacob would fill in these mysterious blanks. For the time being, Liam would have to let them go.
He tried to decide what to do with his phone. The tow truck was gone,
so there was no putting it back in his car. That left only one option. Liam reluctantly turned it off and dropped it into the trash can in front of the CVS.
At least my data is backed up, he thought, and went into the pharmacy to buy a TracFone with one hundred prepaid minutes and Internet access. (He’d realized he’d need to stay connected if he wanted to get anything done.) He also bought black hair dye and a pair of sunglasses.
After he withdrew more money from the ATM, he stopped at a More Than Sneakers for Nikes and a Goodwill for clothes.
Liam found a pair of jeans that fit, which was the only requirement he had, and an oversized army jacket. He was flipping through shirts on one of a dozen circular racks, looking for something nondescript and preferably gray, when he ran across a Teenage Mutant Ninja tee similar to the one his son had been wearing, and wondered if he’d ever see Tommy again. If he was arrested before he could prove his innocence, he doubted it. Catherine would take the kids straight to Mississippi, and by the time Tommy could come see Liam on his own, she might have convinced him it wasn’t worth his time.
Liam couldn’t think about that. It wasn’t going to do him any good. He had to focus on the task at hand. He moved on to the next shirt and flipped past ten more before he found what he was looking for.
Christopher Bell
Chris’s office was a shrine to sports fandom. Among the collection of paraphernalia, he had a pair of mint-condition baseball cards—“Shoeless” Joe Jackson and Pete Rose—framed and hanging behind his desk; a Michael Jordan Bulls jersey, also framed; a photo of Wayne Gretzky closing in on the goal, and a football signed by the entire Northwestern team, including Eric Ricci.
He had four computer monitors mounted to stands on his desk and a fifth on the wall above his door that monitored the movements of selected stocks in real time.
Chris closed the door and pulled up an internal application that would let him check the thief’s credit report. This wasn’t something Chris was supposed to do, but he doubted anybody at Ellison Trust would find out.
Ellison Trust had made an aggressive push to expand their credit card business two years ago. They’d offered cards with limits as low as five hundred dollars and had run an advertising campaign through every regional media outlet. Chris was hoping his thief had signed up for one.
As luck would have it, he had.
It appeared to be one of two credit cards the man carried, and it had a zero balance. Chris called over to Retail Banking and said he had a client who wanted to sign up for alerts. Any amount. Then he provided an email address that was, in fact, his, and prayed the thief would use his card soon. One charge might be all Chris needed to find him.
Liam Parker
Liam dyed his hair in the hotel bathroom, changed his clothes, and killed time watching CNN, which spent most of their airtime talking about the war in Syria and a congressional spending bill. A guest named Christopher Bell commented on the state of the stock market. Liam’s name didn’t come up.
He left the hotel looking and feeling like a new man. His disguise wasn’t so thorough that he was entirely unrecognizable. But with black hair spiked up, eyebrows dyed to match, sunglasses, and clothes he wouldn’t normally wear, even his friends would have to look twice to know for sure it was him.
Backstage turned out to be a dimly lit hole in the wall. There was a coin-operated pool table in the back. Neon signs advertising a wide variety of beer hung behind the bar and in the windows. He found Jacob sitting at a table in the corner.
Before they could get down to business, a waitress appeared to take Liam’s drink order. He asked for a Heineken just to get rid of her.
“You look like a douchebag in those sunglasses,” Jacob said once she was gone.
Liam shrugged. He was pretty sure Jacob was right.
“You got the money?”
Liam pulled an envelope of cash out of the pocket of his army jacket and handed it over. The envelope he had gotten from the hotel’s front desk and had the name Holiday Home printed in the upper-left corner. The bills inside were loose, impossible to count at a glance, but Jacob appeared satisfied with barely a peek.
“So, how do we do this?” Liam asked. “Do you have a guy—”
Like Liam had pulled the cash out of his coat, Jacob took a stack of items from the pocket of his and placed them on the table. They included a driver’s license, a plane ticket, and a passport.
Liam had assumed the bar was simply a meeting place, that they’d go from there to another location where his picture would be taken and any documents prepared. He was also only expecting a driver’s license. A thousand dollars didn’t seem like so much when he considered everything on the table.
He picked up the license. The name on it was Richard Hawthorne. Liam recognized the photo as a headshot from the ConnectPlus website. He hadn’t realized until now how much it had in common with those used on government IDs.
Jacob had used the same photo for the passport. The ticket was for Belarus. “They don’t have an extradition treaty with the US. You leave tomorrow night. After that, you’ll figure it out.”
If Liam was going anywhere, he probably would figure it out. He’d get to Belarus, then transfer the money from his bank accounts in the US through a series of countries until it became untraceable. Not exactly easy-peasy, but doable.
Of course, he’d never be getting on that plane. That was not why he started this.
The waitress showed up with a bottle of Heineken. Liam scooped up the documents and palmed them under the table. She smiled, giving no indication she’d noticed the suspicious behavior. “Here you go, hon.”
Liam took a sip of the beer.
“Where are you staying?” Jacob asked.
He shrugged. “Don’t know.” With a new name at his disposal, he didn’t have any reason to go back to the hotel he was in before, and why would he want to?
“Then I’ve got one more thing for you.” Jacob placed the keycard for a room at a Best Western on the table. “State Street. It’s already paid for. You can stay there until it’s time for your flight.”
The extent of his generosity made Liam uncomfortable. “Why are you doing all this?”
“You paid for it.”
“It’s a lot more than I expected.”
Jacob stood. “If I were you, I wouldn’t think too much about it, okay?” He zipped up his jacket. “Just say thank you.” Then he left. He weaved around a couple of biker types at the pool table and dropped some cash on the waitress’s tray on his way out the door.
Liam, on the other hand, wasn’t in any hurry. Sitting in this bar was the safest he’d felt in a while. He considered what Jacob had said—don’t think too much about it—and looked at the license again, this time examining it closely. It passed the eyeball test. He placed it side by side with his real one for a closer examination. Every detail checked out.
He wondered if Ava had something to do with this. Liam wouldn’t be surprised if she was paying off the cops to make sure they didn’t bother her, and that would mean she had contacts inside the department. Maybe Ava’s app also gave her access to his phone number.
But the theory strained credulity to the point that even Liam, who wanted an explanation, couldn’t buy it. If Ava had contacts in the Chicago PD, how would they know Liam was one of her players? And if they did, why would they tell her they were going to arrest him? Even more importantly, why would Ava care?
Jacob Reed
Jacob didn’t own a car, but since he knew he would need one after his meeting with Liam, he had rented a black Ford Focus. It was in that Ford Focus, half a block from Backstage, where he sat now. He had a clear view of the entrance to the bar. While he waited for Liam to exit, he fiddled with the heat, turning it up, down, and back up again. The temperature was never too hot or too cold. The act of adjusting it was something akin to a nervous twitch.
Liam appeared and got in a cab. Jacob followed from a safe distance, always keeping at least one car between them.
While he didn’t expect to be made since Liam had no reason to think Jacob was following him, he wasn’t taking any chances.
The cab pulled up in front of the Best Western and Liam got out. With the momentum of traffic pushing him along the congested downtown streets, Jacob couldn’t stay where he was long enough to watch Liam go inside, but he didn’t need to. It was obvious Liam had decided to use the hotel room Jacob had rented for him.
Satisfied, Jacob returned to his own hotel. He had rented a room at a Best Western for himself as well, only his was on the other side of town, close to Liam’s condo.
The room was clean and quiet. It had red carpet, a single queen bed, dressed all in white, and a small desk with a leather chair and a matching dresser on the other side of the room.
Jacob sat down at the desk, opened his laptop, and went to work. There wasn’t a photo of Richard Hawthorne anywhere online. He’d never been on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. He’d never posted a picture on Instagram.
It was time for that to change.
Jacob spent a lot of hours opening accounts and adding strangers as friends. (It was amazing how many people would accept friend requests from someone they’d never met.) He posted pictures of Liam under Richard Hawthorne’s name. He commented, liked, and shared until he felt like Richard had a solid web presence.
Then he set his alarm for nine a.m. and got four solid hours of shut eye.
Liam Parker
Liam’s room was a mirror image of Jacob’s. He anxiously paced the carpet trying to figure out what to do. He had the TV on for company and the curtains closed.
Twice, he picked up the phone to call his kids and decided it was a bad idea. Then he decided it would be a bad idea not to. Depending on how all this played out, who knew how many more times he’d get to speak with them? He dialed his wife’s home number.
A Reagan Keeter Box Set: Three page-turning thrillers that will leave you wondering who you can trust Page 32