42

Ella had never in her life been more terrified.

She couldn’t understand how this guy, DeMarco, had identified her. It just didn’t make any sense. Even if one of the witnesses—like the barmaid or the bartender—had told DeMarco that a woman had coerced them to change their testimony, they wouldn’t have been able to identify her as Ella Fields.

Nobody in New York—not David Slade, not the witnesses, not Carmine Fratello—knew her name was Ella Fields. She’d never told any of those people her name. She’d even worn disguises when she met with them so they would have a harder time identifying her. And when she rented the apartment in Chelsea, rented a car, and paid for the hotel room where she met with Slade, she didn’t use a credit card in her own name.

Bill had always been incredibly casual—foolishly casual, in Ella’s opinion—about protecting his identify. He figured the way he would get caught was that one day a witness he thought he’d turned would turn on him, and Bill would show up for a meeting and the cops would nab him—and it wouldn’t matter what ID he was carrying in his pocket. He also hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to phone security until Ella started working with him.

But there was one thing Bill did do that Ella really appreciated: He did everything he could to protect her by making sure she couldn’t be tied to his activities financially. When he rented a house, he rented it in his name only. He filed a tax return every year based on a phony salary that he claimed he made as a consultant, but he filed as being single; he never asked Ella to take his last name after they were married. Ella was listed as a joint holder on his bank accounts, but Bill was the one who deposited the money. His objective was to make sure that Ella didn’t wind up in jail for income tax evasion, wire fraud, or any other financial crime. And when Ella started working with him directly, one of the first things Bill did, at her insistence, was get her a bulletproof false identity.

Bill knew a man in San Antonio who made his living making IDs for Mexican illegals. The guy didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the Mexicans, but for Ella, he went all out. The real Carol Owen was a runaway from El Paso, the same age as Ella, who had disappeared at the age of fourteen. She had most likely died, but then Carol’s drug-addict mother died too, and Carol was never declared legally dead. So the guy in San Antonio obtained Owen’s social security number and birth certificate, and using those documents he got Ella a passport, a driver’s license, and credit cards. She even had an AAA card in case her car broke down.

When Ella was working and had to show an ID for anything—such as renting a car—she used the Owen ID. The only time Ella used her real ID was when she’d traveled with Bill on vacations and they were doing things that were totally legitimate, such as taking a cruise. But even then, Bill paid for things using his credit cards.

What all this meant was that if Ella slipped up, the cops might learn that there was a Carol Owen who was tampering with witnesses, but Ella Fields would be able to get on a plane and fly far away as Ella Fields. But somehow, this damn guy, DeMarco, had learned that she was married to Bill—he must have found a record of their marriage license. And then—and this was the part that made no sense—he’d concluded she was in New York and involved in the Rosenthal case. How in the hell could that have happened?

When it came to cell phones, which could be easily monitored and used to track people, Ella was particularly careful. She had one phone in the name of Carol Owen that she used for communicating with George Chavez, and she put down that phone number when she rented an apartment or made an airline reservation. But she used prepaid cell phones for everything else, and when she came to New York one of the first things she did was buy half a dozen burner phones; she used a different phone to communicate with Slade, each of the witnesses, Curtis, and Carmine Fratello.

She didn’t see any way DeMarco would know about Carmine or Curtis, but if he got a warrant to look at the witnesses’ phone records, he’d see that the witnesses were communicating with someone with an unregistered phone. And if he asked the witnesses who had called them, what story would the witnesses give? The other problem—the bigger problem—was that if the cops got the numbers of the phones she’d used to talk to the witnesses, they could locate her using them.

She needed to get rid of all the damn phones.

She also needed to find out if DeMarco had asked the barmaid and the bartender about her. So she called them, and was furious to learn that DeMarco had spoken to them and asked if anyone had tried to get them to change their testimony. They both said they lied to DeMarco and told him that no one had talked to them. Well, at least that was good.

She then called Curtis, the maintenance guy at Esther Behrman’s assisted living place, and asked if a cop named DeMarco had asked about her—and that’s when she learned that DeMarco had shown Curtis her picture.

“What!” she shrieked.

Curtis said, “In the picture you had short blond hair, not like the hair you had when we met, but I knew it was you.”

“What did you tell him?” Ella said.

“I said I never saw you before. But he went all over the place showing everyone your picture. I don’t know if anyone else said they saw you.”

“Why in the hell didn’t you call me when he asked you about me?” Ella said.

“I don’t know what happened with Esther, but I do know I didn’t do anything illegal. I just didn’t want to, you know, get in any deeper.”

Son of a bitch! DeMarco not only knew her name but had a photo of her. If the bartender admitted that she’d paid him off or if the barmaid said that Ella had forced her to change her testimony, she was screwed.

What she should do was get the hell out of New York. The trial started in two weeks, and there was really nothing more she needed to arrange when it came to Toby Rosenthal’s case. All the witnesses and Carmine Fratello were prepared to testify and Slade was ready to present his defense, the one that would point to Dante Bello as the killer. And as she’d already told Slade, whether he liked it or not, she wasn’t going to do anything to Rachel Quinn. So her work in New York was done and there was no reason to stay in the city any longer—other than to make sure Slade paid her the million he owed her.

She hunted through her rented apartment in vain for a hammer; apparently, the doctor who had subleased her the place had never had any use for one. So she took a brass candlestick, laid a thick towel on the doctor’s hardwood floor, and used the candlestick to smash all her cell phones to smithereens—including her Carol Owen phone. She didn’t think DeMarco could possibly know about her Carol Owen ID, but she couldn’t take the chance. As upset as she was, she just whaled the shit out of those phones, plastic pieces flying all over the apartment. She was lucky she didn’t end up with a splinter in her eye, not to mention that the doctor wasn’t going to be too happy when he saw the condition of his candlestick.

She left the apartment and walked down the street and dumped the remnants of all the phones into several different trash cans just in case there was still some functioning electronic part she hadn’t managed to kill, then stopped at a store and bought three more phones so she’d have clean, untraceable ones to use.

Returning to her apartment, she started toward the bedroom, planning to pack her clothes, but then saw her reflection in a mirror. She’d been running her hands through her hair as she paced the apartment, and her hair was sticking up in spikes. And her eyes. She had the eyes of an animal with its paw caught in a trap.

She stopped and looked directly into the mirror and said: “Ella Sue, get a fucking grip on yourself.”

She sat down on the bed and asked herself: What did DeMarco really know?

He knew she’d been married to Bill. But so what? Being married to Bill wasn’t a crime, and she doubted that DeMarco could prove that she’d worked with Bill. He knew what she looked like, but again, so what? If he could prove she’d tampered with the witnesses in the Rosenthal case, then he could arrest her—but the only way he’d be able to prove that was if Jack, Kathy, or Edmundo talked, and she knew these three wouldn’t talk, as they’d all accepted money from her.

She needed to keep her eye on the big picture, and the big picture was that she wanted to keep on doing this kind of work until she’d made enough money to retire comfortably. She could, of course, do what she’d planned to do when she first left Calhoun Falls, and marry a rich guy; she knew she was attractive enough to snag one. But she liked doing what she did. She enjoyed the challenge and being her own boss and living the way she wanted without having to compromise to keep some man happy. And she’d proved with the Rosenthal case—a case more complicated than any she and Bill had ever dealt with in the past—that she could do the work on her own. After David Slade got an acquittal for Toby Rosenthal he would definitely refer her to other lawyers, and George Chavez could use her success in the Rosenthal case to get her other clients.

What she needed to do was not panic, and stay in New York until the trial started just in case Slade needed her help—and to make sure Slade paid her the final installment. In the meantime, and although she had no reason to believe her Carol Owen ID had been compromised, she’d find someplace else to live and whenever she ventured outside she’d wear a disguise.

The following day, Ella packed her bags and moved out of the apartment in Chelsea. She rented a room for two weeks at a cheap hotel in Chinatown, paying cash. The place was a god-awful dump; a Motel 6 looked like the Ritz-Carlton compared with it.

Next she called the forger in San Antonio and told him to make her another ID as good as the Carol Owen ID. He said it was going to take him at least a month—and she told him to speed it up. If she had to run, she wanted to be able to run under some name other than Ella Fields or Carol Owen.

She thought again about the calls she’d made to the witnesses and the possibility of the cops looking at the witnesses’ phone records. How would the witnesses explain, if asked, who’d called them from an unregistered cell phone? She thought about that for a bit, then had to hunt for almost an hour to find a pay phone.

She called Jack Morris and Kathy Tolliver and told them what they would say if someone asked about the phone calls she’d made to them. Jack said he could use a little more cash—big surprise, he’d had another bad weekend in AC—but he was cool about what Ella wanted him to do.

Kathy was not so cool. The girl started shrieking about how Ella was going to land her in jail and how then her daughter would be taken from her no matter what happened at Toby’s trial. So Ella had to calm her down, threaten her a bit more about what would happen to her daughter if she didn’t testify correctly at the trial, and then made sure Kathy knew what to say if anyone asked about her phone records.

Yeah, everything was going to be all right.